Finance

Red-hot startup Snowflake is adding support for Google's cloud in an effort to meet Wall Street's demand

Google CEO Sundar Pichai
Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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One of the hottest startups in the cloud-computing space is adding support for Google Cloud as it hopes to court Wall Street clients.

Snowflake, the cloud-based data warehouse valued at $3.5 billion, will soon be able to work with customer data in Google's public cloud, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter who declined to be named because the plans have not yet been made public.  

The Silicon Valley-based startup helps its customers store their data across multiple cloud platforms, as well as their own servers and data centers. It also helps clean up that data and prepare it for intensive data analysis.

Snowflake already supports moving data to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, the two leading cloud platforms. With the addition of Google, Snowflake will cover the three main American public-cloud providers in the space. 

Spokespeople for Snowflake and Google declined to comment. 

Read more: JPMorgan has tapped buzzy startup Snowflake to help it solve one of the biggest issues firms face when moving to the cloud

Snowflake's decision to add support for Google was partially prompted by Wall Street firms, including hedge funds and asset managers, who wanted use of the tech company's cloud, one of the sources said. 

It's no surprise Wall Street would push for Snowflake to broaden the public clouds it works with. As financial firms grow more comfortable with their usage of the cloud, many are beginning to fully develop a public-cloud strategy. 

Read more: Wall Street is finally willing to go to Amazon's, Google's, or Microsoft's cloud, but nobody can agree on the best way to do it: 'If you pick a favorite and you're wrong, you're fired'

Ideally, most would like to be "cloud agnostic," meaning they'd maintain the ability to seamlessly move between clouds without worry about vendor lock in. With the inclusion of Google support, Snowflake will cover financial firms' three main options in the space. 

In May, Business Insider reported JPMorgan had chosen to work with Snowflake to help it develop its cloud strategy, which would include working across multiple providers. 

More specific to Google, the company's cloud has "has the best machine learning and AI capabilities which are needed for a lot of market analysis from forex to capital flows to trading desk support," according to Ray Wang, an analyst with Constellation Research. 

Additional reporting by Ben Pimentel in San Francisco

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Dan DeFrancesco
Dan DeFrancesco
Dan is the lead writer for BI Today, Business Insider's flagship daily newsletter. Sometimes he interviews executives about everything from AI's impact on capitalism to robotics to the potential SaaSpocalypse. Sometimes he makes Mad Libs for AI-driven layoff announcements.Dan previously covered financial technology and market structure for BI as a reporter and editor. His work includes everything from inside Robinhood's failed "Checking and Savings" product that eventually led to Congress getting involved to the internal arguments over JPMorgan's failed attempt to launch a finance app for millennials.Before joining BI, Dan wrote about derivatives and commodities for Risk.net and fintech for WatersTechnology. If you played high school sports in the lower Hudson Valley between 2012 and 2014 there's a good chance he wrote about you during his first real journalism job at The Journal News. Got a tip? Contact this editor via email at ddefrancesco@bjinnox.com.