Snowflake Inc. SNOW

The business

Snowflake runs a data platform in the cloud where a company keeps everything it knows and asks questions of it. The distinguishing design choice is that storage and computing are billed separately, so a customer pays to keep data cheaply and pays again, by the second, only when running a query. That consumption model is why revenue tracks usage rather than seat count, and it is the reason the growth line means something: customers are running more queries, not signing bigger contracts they may not use.

13,912 customers, including 813 of the Forbes Global 2000. The pitch now attaches artificial intelligence workloads to the same stored data, which is where the incremental consumption is expected to come from.