Bozeman, Montana – In a strategic move, Snowflake, the leading data cloud company, has appointed Sridhar Ramaswamy as its new Chief Executive Officer, marking yet another addition to the growing list of Indian-origin CEOs steering global tech giants. Ramaswamy, who previously served as Senior Vice President of AI at Snowflake, replaces the retiring Frank Slootman and is set to lead the company into its next phase of growth, particularly in the realms of AI and machine learning.
Slootman expressed confidence in Ramaswamy’s leadership, emphasizing the pivotal role he will play in driving Snowflake’s innovation and delivering substantial business value through AI. Ramaswamy, who joined Snowflake in 2023 as part of the Neeva acquisition, has been instrumental in shaping the company’s AI strategy. Under his guidance, Snowflake launched Cortex, a fully managed service simplifying and securing AI processes for users to swiftly realize business value.
Prior to his role at Snowflake, Ramaswamy co-founded Neeva in 2019, specializing in private AI-powered search engines. His extensive experience includes heading Google’s Advertising products for 15 years, contributing significantly to the growth of AdWords and Google’s advertising business from $1.5 billion to over $100 billion.
Ramaswamy’s career also features research positions at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and Bell Communications Research. Moreover, he served as a Venture Partner at Greylock Partners and currently holds a position on the board of trustees at Brown University.
Snowflake, founded in 2012, focuses on helping organizations utilize their data efficiently through its data cloud platform. The company facilitates secure data sharing, discovery, and the execution of various AI/ML and analytic workloads.
The announcement coincides with the recent appointment of Vijayant Rai as Snowflake’s Managing Director for India, reinforcing the company’s commitment to the Indian market.
The global tech landscape continues to witness a surge in Indian-origin executives assuming leadership roles. Notable figures include Sundar Pichai (Google and Alphabet), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Neal Mohan (YouTube), Ajay Banga (World Bank Group), Vivek Sankaran (Albertsons), and George Kurian (NetApp).
In a similar move in August 2023, Snowflake appointed Indian-origin Vaibhav Taneja, formerly the Chief Accounting Officer at Tesla, as its Chief Financial Officer (CFO).
