Indian-origin Sridhar Ramaswamy takes over as Snowflake CEO

Another Indian has taken over at the top shot of a tech major in the United States of America. Sridhar Ramaswamy, an IITan, has taken over as Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors of Data Cloud company Snowflake.

Ramaswamy, who was the Senior Vice President of AI at Snowflake, took over from Frank Slootman who retired as the CEO of Snowflake on Wednesday. “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,” stated Ramaswamy after his elevation.

Slootman will continue to serve as Chairman of the Board at Snowflake. “As the leading cloud data platform, Snowflake is at the epicenter of the AI revolution. There is no better person than Sridhar to lead Snowflake into this 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,” said Slootman.

“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.”

The 1967 born Ramaswamy is from Tamil Nadu in India. He went to the US in 1989 after completing his B.Tech degree in Computer Science from IIT Madras. He went on to do his Ph.D. in computer science from Brown University in the US before embarking on his career.

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.

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