Sridhar Ramaswamy

Sridhar Ramaswamy is the chief executive officer of Snowflake, the cloud data platform company he now leads after a career spanning Bell Labs research, fifteen years building Google's advertising business, and founding his own AI-powered search start-up. He holds a PhD in computer science and began his career in industrial research at Bell Labs and Bellcore before moving into product leadership at Google, where he eventually oversaw search, display and video advertising, analytics, shopping, payments and travel, a portfolio he helped grow from roughly $1.5 billion to more than $100 billion in revenue.

After leaving Google in 2018, Ramaswamy spent time as a venture partner at Greylock Partners before co-founding Neeva in 2019, a subscription-funded, privacy-focused search engine positioned as an alternative to advertising-driven search. Neeva struggled to gain mainstream consumer traction against Google's dominance, and in 2023 Snowflake acquired the company, bringing Ramaswamy and its AI search technology in-house as the foundation for what would become Snowflake Cortex, the company's managed AI service.

Ramaswamy initially joined Snowflake as senior vice president of AI, where he built out the company's generative AI product line at a moment when enterprises were racing to combine their proprietary data with large language models. His performance in that role, and his credibility as someone who had built AI products from the ground up, positioned him as the natural successor when Frank Slootman announced his retirement, and Ramaswamy became chief executive officer in February 2024.

As CEO, Ramaswamy has pushed Snowflake to defend its position as enterprises' data platform of choice against Databricks and the major cloud providers, doubling down on consumption-based pricing and expanding Cortex's AI capabilities while arguing publicly that rigid job descriptions and organisational charts poorly reflect how modern technology companies actually operate. He has emphasised keeping enterprise data secure and governed even as it is opened up to AI models, a positioning aimed at large regulated customers.

Ramaswamy also serves on the board of trustees at Brown University and remains a frequent commentator on the trajectory of enterprise AI adoption. His path from advertising economics to AI-native search to leading one of the most closely watched data companies in the world reflects the broader convergence of data infrastructure and artificial intelligence that now defines the sector he leads.