Snowflake mulling to set up research and develop centre in India: CEO

San Francisco, Jun 3 (PTI) Snowflake, an enterprise AI company, is planning to set up a research and development facility in India as part of its expansion in the country, according to a senior company official.

The company has several US clients, with their divisions operating out of India, and is training talents to work closely with them locally, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said.

"In India, our priorities are three-fold. One, we have a really excellent team that is primarily centred in Pune, and they do a lot of our enterprise technology work. They also are key parts of our overall finance systems, and we are actively thinking about having an R&D centre in Pune as well. We have a very decent presence with digital natives in India, and we will continue to lean into that," he said.

The company globally has 11,000 employees, and around 600 are based out of India.

Snowflake provides artificial intelligence technology to enterprises with a focus on making the data sets available to them and helping them become more productive.

The company recently reported USD 1 billion revenue in the first quarter ended April 30, 2025, with a profit of USD 711.5 million, reflecting 71 per cent growth in margins on a year-on-year basis.

Snowflake is estimated to clock 25 per cent year-on-year growth to USD 4.3 billion in FY26.

Ramaswamy said Snowflake is working with Indian companies for technology collaboration.

"We are having a set of conversations with somewhat more traditional companies in India that can also benefit from a modern data platform like Snowflake," Ramaswamy said.

The company works with Indian companies like LTIMindtree and TCS, which provide its solutions to enterprises across the markets where they operate.

Ramaswamy stated that Snowflake is investing in India to allow the company's team to collaborate with its overseas clients who have operations in the country.

"We are finding that many large customers, banks included, that are based in the United States often have entire divisions that are stacked completely in India. We are invested in having GCCs in India so that they can work closely with our customers that have a larger presence there," he said.

Snowflake is also investing in developing a data-proficient talent pool in India for the growing AI ecosystem.

"We want to make sure that we are training the next generation of (talent). You can call them data scientists. You can call them data analysts, AI and data proficient people. We are invested in just local enablement in data and AI products with a little bit of a Snowflake angle, but much more with an angle of how do we get more people to be data and AI literate in those countries," Ramaswamy said.

The company has collaborated with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and industry body Nasscom-led skilling platform FutureSkills Prime.

Through the collaboration with FutureSkills Prime, Snowflake and Nasscom aim to enrol 1 lakh professional and student learners in Snowflake's on-demand free entry-level data and AI skills courses in the next two years.

The collaboration is part of Snowflake's global programme One Million Minds and One Platform, which aims AI upskilling.

"This is a way in which we train, and we help train the next generation of people that are going to be highly data and AI proficient. And it's very much a long-term move because we think that eventually, this will pay off in terms of people just knowing the value of systems like Snowflake," Ramaswamy said. PTI PRS BAL BAL