Snowflake raised new funding of $479 million at a valuation of $12.4 billion, according to Forbes.

Snowflake, the cloud data warehousing company, may formally announce the funding today, though Forbes broke the news on Friday.

Dragoneer Investment Group led the round with participation from Salesforce.

The latest round would triple Snowflake’s previous valuation of $3.95 billion to $12.4 billion.

High growth company

“We just closed off our previous fiscal year, which ended last Friday, and our revenue grew at 174%,” said CEO Frank Slootman (pictured above) to TechCrunch. “For the scale that we are, this is by far the fastest-growing company out there…So, that’s not your average asset,” he said.

Snowflake currently has 3,400 active customers, and Slootman told Forbes in October that some of the largest ones were spending tens of millions of dollars annually with Snowflake.

The Salesforce connection

Snowflake already partners with the top cloud names, including Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL), and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT).

The previous funding round of $450 million in October 2018 allowed the company to start a relationship with the $165 billion Salesforce, cemented further in the latest round.

Slootman sees a big opportunity in Salesforce data being easily accessible inside the Snowflake platform. The feature would allow easy movement of data between major cloud platforms, creating a cloud networking effect.

“One of the key distinguishing architectural aspects of Snowflake is that once you’re on our platform, it’s extremely easy to exchange data with other Snowflake users. That’s one of the key architectural underpinnings. So content strategy induces network effect, which in turn causes more people, more data to land on the platform, and that serves our business model,” Slootman said to TechCrunch.

IPO?

The latest round has brought Snowflake’s funding to over $1.4 billion. It’s not in a hurry for an IPO, and neither is it facing any pressure from investors wanting to exit.

But employees certainly want to cash in their shares, and that itself may be the reason for Snowflake to go public.

“The only reason that there’s always a sense of pressure around this is because it’s important for employees, and I’m not minimizing that at all,” said Slootman.

The likely time frame is possibly 2020, maybe 2021, but not later than that, he said.

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