Indian-origin Sridhar Ramaswamy named CEO of data cloud firm Snowflake

New York, Feb 29 (IANS) Indian-origin Sridhar Ramaswamy has been named as the Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors of US-based data cloud company Snowflake.

Ramaswamy, who previously held the position of Senior Vice President of AI at Snowflake, replaces Frank Slootman who has decided to retire but will continue to serve as Chairman of the Board.

“In the last 12 years, Frank and the entire team have established Snowflake as the leading cloud data platform that is providing enterprises with the secure, scalable and cost effective data foundation and cutting-edge AI building blocks they need to build for the future,” said Ramaswamy.

“I am honored to have been chosen to lead the company into this next chapter of growth. We have an enormous opportunity ahead to help all customers leverage AI to deliver massive business value. My focus will be on accelerating our ability to bring innovation to our customers and partners," Ramaswamy added.

Since joining Snowflake in May 2023 in connection with the company’s acquisition of Neeva, the world’s first private AI-powered search engine, Ramaswamy has been spearheading Snowflake’s AI strategy.

He led the launch of Snowflake Cortex, Snowflake’s new fully managed service that makes AI simple and secure for all users to quickly drive business value.

Slootman said that there is no better person than Ramaswamy to lead Snowflake into the next phase of growth and deliver on the opportunity ahead in AI and machine learning.

"He is a visionary technologist with a proven track record of running and scaling successful businesses. I have the utmost confidence in Sridhar and look forward to working with him as he assumes this new role,” Slootman said.

Prior to joining Snowflake, Ramaswamy co-founded Neeva in 2019.

Previously, Ramaswamy led all of Google’s Advertising products, which included search, display and video advertising, analytics, shopping, payments, and travel.

During his 15 years at Google he was an integral part of the growth of AdWords and Google’s advertising business from $1.5 billion to over $100 billion.

Ramaswamy also held research positions at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and Bell Communications Research (Bellcore).

He was a Venture Partner at Greylock Partners from October 2018 until recently, and he sits on the board of trustees at Brown University.