Shares of Data Cloud Company Snowflake Plunge After Indian American Sridhar Ramaswamy Named CEO
- The 57-year-old, who most recently was the senior vice president of AI, joined the company last year, after it acquired Neeva, an AI-powered search engine that he co-founded in 2019.
Snowflake has promoted Sridhar Ramaswamy as chief executive officer and member of the board of directors effective immediately, the data cloud company announced this week. The Indian American, who most recently was the senior vice president of AI, will replace Frank Slootman, who will continue to serve as Chairman of the Board.
Ramaswamy joined Snowflake in 2023 after it acquired Neeva, an AI-powered search engine that Ramsaswamy co-founded in 2019. Since then he has been “spearheading Snowflake’s AI strategy,” the company news release said. He led the launch of Snowflake Cortex, “the company’s new fully managed service that makes AI simple and secure for all users to quickly drive business value.”
According to Investopedia, “Snowflake shares plunged more than 20% during after-hours trading on Feb. 28, after the company named Ramaswamy, 57, as the new CEO, and issued earnings guidance that fell short of Wall Street expectations.”
The announcement of the CEO change “coincided with the release of Snowflake’s fiscal 2024 fourth-quarter earnings report.,” Investopedia said, adding that a “the product revenue in the quarter ending Jan. 31 rose 33% to $738.1 million.” The company recorded a “net loss of $169.9 million, which was narrower than the $207.5 million loss a year earlier and also better than Wall Street anticipated.”
Before co-founding Neeva, Ramaswamy led all of Google’s Advertising products. During his 15 years at the company he was “an integral part of the growth of AdWords and Google’s advertising business from $1.5 billion to over $100 billion,” the Snowflake news release said. He also held research positions at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and Bell Communications Research (Bellcore). He was a Venture Partner at Greylock Partners from October 2018 until recently, and he sits on the board of trustees at Brown University.
Born in Tiruchirappalli (Trichy) in Tamil Nadu, he completed his bachelor’s degree in computer science from IIT Madras. He moved to the U.S. in 1989 to pursue his masters degree and PhD in computer science at Brown University. He lives in Cupertino, California, with his wife and two sons.