Snowflake to set up R&D centre in India, expand operations in Pune

Cloud data firm Snowflake plans to open an R&D centre in India alongside its Pune CoE as part of its larger push to grow local talent and enterprise technology capability

Snowflake, a cloud-based data warehousing company, is looking to set up a research and development (R&D) centre in India soon, in addition to the Centre of Excellence (CoE) it has in Pune, the company’s chief executive officer said.

 

“Snowflake is committed to growing our India business and continuing to invest in strengthening our talent base, expanding our office presence, and building capabilities to drive enterprise tech work out of our Pune CoE. To this extent, we are also actively considering setting up our R&D centre in India soon,” Sridhar Ramaswamy said during a virtual media roundtable ahead of the Snowflake Summit 2025 on June 3.

 

Ramaswamy, who has been the CEO since last year, did not disclose the timeline for opening the centre. Snowflake has more than 600 employees in India and plans to add close to 100 people by the end of this year across sales, operations, solutions engineering, marketing, and the CoE. It was not immediately clear whether the R&D centre will also be located in Pune. The company also has an office in Bengaluru. 

 

Ramaswamy added that one of the programmes led by the CoE is ‘Snowflake on Snowflake’, where the team uses Snowflake’s platform to build some of the applications that the company leverages internally. For example, one of the applications helps the Snowflake sales team identify new revenue opportunities and increase sales productivity.

 

He also said the services industry is undergoing a major transformation, with the roles of engineers and salespeople being redefined due to the impact of AI.

 

In response to a query on how enterprises are organising their structured and unstructured data to leverage the benefits of AI, Christian Kleinerman, executive vice-president, product, said AI has lowered the bar for extracting value from unstructured data. “The world has been sitting on terabytes of unstructured data with difficulty understanding it. AI makes it easy to do classification and extract entities in an unprecedented way. That’s made organisations look for solutions that blend structured and unstructured data,” he said.