The company aims to position Chile as a hub for South America through a Santiago-based operation staffed by executives specialized in meeting the needs of Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina.
The story has several parts, but to organize our thoughts, we could start from the end and work backward: Snowflake, the artificial intelligence (AI) giant that began in a California garage and was founded by three Frenchmen, is now expanding into Chile, making it a strategic market for the Southern Cone.
The company was founded in 2012 by three French engineers at a time when AI was still in its infancy. The three—Benoît Dageville and Thierry Cruanes, former Oracle employees, and Marcin Żukowski, formerly of Vectorwise—designed a data management system from scratch.
In its latest earnings report, the company—which has been publicly traded in the United States since 2020—reported total revenue of $1.39 billion (+33% YoY), more than 13,900 customers using its services and 9,000 employees.
To put it simply, they describe Snowflake as “the platform for the AI era, enabling companies to innovate faster and derive greater value from their data. The world’s largest companies use Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to build, use and share data, applications and AI.”
The Local Hub
This week, two key Snowflake executives were in Chile. Regional Vice President for Latin America Bruno Barreto and Regional Manager for Latin America and the Caribbean Danilo Lazaro are well-versed in the challenges of the Chilean market, where they officially launched operations. In a conversation with Forbes, they explained the importance of establishing a presence in the local market.
“If we look at Chile within the context of Latin America, it is always at the forefront—an early adopter where innovation always accelerates faster. So the goal is to say, ‘We are going for Chile; we are going to invest in Chile; and we are going to make Chile thrive—not just for that market, but hand in hand with Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay—and capture a share of the market with Snowflake,’” they explained.
The objective, they add, is to operate a Santiago-based hub staffed by executives specialized in meeting the needs of each of these markets. “These four countries are our focus. Of the four, Chile is the only one that serves as a hub covering the entire Southern Cone for us,” they clarified.
Source: Forbes Chile.
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