Benoît Dageville

Benoît Dageville is a French-born computer scientist and one of the three co-founders of Snowflake, the cloud data warehousing company that redefined how enterprises store and analyse data. Before starting Snowflake, Dageville spent years as a data architect at Oracle Corporation, where he worked deeply on database internals and query optimisation, experience that shaped his conviction that traditional on-premises data warehouse architecture was fundamentally mismatched to the elasticity of cloud computing.

In 2012, Dageville co-founded Snowflake in San Mateo, California, alongside fellow former Oracle architect Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Żukowski, co-founder of the database company Vectorwise. The trio set out to build a data platform native to the cloud rather than adapted to it, with an architecture that separated storage and compute so customers could scale each independently and pay only for what they used. Snowflake launched its first commercial product in 2015 after an initial period of stealth development.

As the company grew, Dageville took on the role of president of products, overseeing the technical roadmap as Snowflake expanded from a single cloud data warehouse into a broader data cloud platform spanning data sharing, application development, and, more recently, artificial intelligence tooling. He has remained close to the underlying engineering of the platform even as Snowflake scaled into a public company with tens of thousands of customers, a role that distinguishes him from more externally facing counterparts at rival firms.

Dageville has continued to represent Snowflake's technical vision publicly, including at the company's annual Summit conference, where in 2026 he described an ambition to build 'an AI platform for every professional,' framing Snowflake's data governance and modelling capabilities as the foundation on which enterprise AI applications should be built. That positioning reflects his consistent argument that reliable, well-governed data infrastructure, not the AI models themselves, is the harder and more durable problem for large organisations to solve.

As co-founder and one of the principal architects of a company that helped define the modern cloud data warehouse category and went on to complete one of the largest software IPOs in history, Dageville remains one of the most technically influential figures in enterprise data infrastructure, even as chief executive duties have passed to others around him.