US-based AI data cloud company Snowflake, which is nearly completing five years of operations in India, said the Indian market is fastest-growing for them. This growth is driven by the increasing number of enterprises embarking on their journeys to manage massive structured and unstructured data and apply AI solutions for enhanced outcomes, Vijayant Rai, managing director for India at Snowflake, told FE.
The company specialises in providing cloud-based data storage and AI-driven solutions that enable businesses to process and analyse data for better insights. To put it simply, companies like Swiggy can identify the most ordered food items during specific periods or optimise delivery routes to areas with high order volumes, it is with the help of Snowflake’s data analytics solutions at the backend.
“India is a growth market because the penetration levels are still low on data. So we’re seeing that itself will contribute quite handsomely for us,” Rai said. He added that India’s progress towards becoming a data-driven economy indicates that enterprises are increasingly willing to pay for value.
The low penetration of AI data solutions in India means many companies are sitting on vast amounts of data without fully utilising solutions to manage and extract valuable insights from it.
Snowflake’s client list includes companies such as Swiggy, Urban Company, Marico and Piramal Finance, among others. Through its product Cortex AI, Snowflake also assists companies in building generative AI applications and managing and fine-tuning their large language models (LLMs). Like LLMs developed by Meta, OpenAI, and Mistral, Snowflake has created its LLM model for enterprises, named Snowflake Arctic.
In India, Snowflake is gaining traction in sectors like banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI), manufacturing, retail, and logistics. Rai said the company is investing in various go-to-market strategies to expand coverage, strengthen its partner network, and grow its technical team in India. Additionally, Snowflake is investing in its centre of excellence in Pune, which employs 500 people focused on support and operations.
“We have a very large set of global enterprise customers based in India. So, we have set up a separate team just to look at the global customers in India and how we can support them better,” Rai said.
Snowflake has over 700 employees in India and is actively looking to expand its team across go-to-market verticals, with a focus on increasing its developer base as well.
Regarding the rising competition in India, Rai said, “We’ll be ahead of a lot of the competition out there because we already have customers right across the spectrum. What we’re doing now is scaling all of that to the next level by use cases, by getting partner representation, and our own investments in India.”
“The way we would differentiate and compete in the market is basically in terms of what value we deliver to the customers,” he added.
Rai sated that one of the company’s key focuses is building industry-specific use cases that prioritise customer outcomes.
Some differentiators such as good time-to-value for enterprises because of the software as a service (SaaS) nature of the product, scope for data collaboration within teams and across organisations with privacy, as well as AI infrastructure, place Snowflake better in the market, the company said.
Globally, Snowflake’s revenue in FY24 increased by 36% year-over-year to $2.8 billion (around Rs 23,700 crore). However, the company’s losses also grew to $836 million (around Rs 7,000 crore) in FY24, driven by significant investments in research and development as well as sales and marketing.
The company did not share the India specific numbers.
According to International Data Corporation (IDC), AI and generative AI adoption in India has seen a significant rise, encompassing software, services, and hardware for AI-centric systems. IDC projects that spending in this area will reach $6 billion (Rs 50,000 crore) by 2027, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.7% for the period from 2022 to 2027.
When asked about data localisation and privacy, Rai said, Snowflake has complied with the data protection Act and the data residency norms, looking at the local laws.
