Despite poor guidance, Snowflake CEO is optimistic about the future
After an earnings report that saw a beat on revenue but poor guidance, CEO of data cloud company Snowflake Frank Slootman was firm in his optimism about the company's future.
"If you were to zoom out a little bit and say, 'let me take a five-year view of the growth here,' it is tremendous," Slootman told CNBC's Jim Cramer. "Very large secular trends, very big markets are forming here, and we can't lose sight of that by looking at a single period, so I'm super optimistic about the path that we're on."
Snowflake reported $624 million in fiscal first-quarter revenue on Wednesday, showing 48% growth year over year, and comfortably topped the consensus Refinitiv estimate of $608 million. However, second-quarter and full-year guidance fell short of expectations, sending shares down 12% in extended trading.
Slootman also discussed the groundbreaking potential of generative artificial intelligence for Snowflake. He said the company is experiencing "tremendous gravitational pull" when it comes to generative AI, as the models train well on Snowflake's "highly curated, highly optimized" data.
The company CEO went so far as to say Snowflake is rapidly becoming an AI company as well as a data company.
"It's very exciting because we went public with the tagline, 'Mobilizing the World's Data,' and we now have opportunities to mobilize data in ways we could not have foreseen just a few days ago," he said. "This is incredibly empowering to individuals and to industries and to literally everything that moves."
Snowflake also announced Wednesday that it was acquiring search startup Neeva, saying in a blog post that it will "infuse and leverage" the company's AI-equipped search products.
Source: CNBC
