Sridhar Ramaswamy

Sridhar Ramaswamy
Born	1967-02-26February 26, 1967 (age 59) Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India
Nationality	Indian-American
Education	Indian Institute of Technology Madras (B.Tech), Brown University (M.S., Ph.D.)
Occupation	Computer scientist, business executive
Company	Snowflake Inc.
Title	Chief Executive Officer of Snowflake Inc.

Sridhar Ramaswamy (born 26 February 1967) is an Indian-American computer scientist and technology executive. He is the chief executive officer and a director of Snowflake Inc., the publicly traded data and artificial intelligence company, a position he has held since 27 February 2024. Before joining the company, Ramaswamy spent fifteen years at Google, rising to senior vice president of advertising and commerce and overseeing the company's advertising business at a time it generated more than $100 billion a year. He left Google in 2018, became a venture partner at Greylock Partners, and in 2019 founded Neeva Inc., a subscription-funded, advertisement-free search engine that he ran as chief executive until the company acquired it in 2023.

Ramaswamy earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 1989 and a master's degree and doctorate in computer science from Brown University, completing his PhD in 1995 under the database theorist Paris Kanellakis. He worked in industrial research at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies and Bell Communications Research before joining the enterprise software company E.piphany, from which Google recruited him in 2003.

At Snowflake, Ramaswamy succeeded Frank Slootman, who retired as chief executive and remained chairman of the board. Ramaswamy's appointment came with one of the largest first-year compensation packages disclosed by a newly appointed American public-company chief executive, a package that drew sustained shareholder criticism and, in 2025, a rare defeat in the company's non-binding advisory vote on executive pay. Under his leadership the company's revenue has continued to grow by double digits annually, it has made several acquisitions to expand its artificial intelligence products, and it has faced securities litigation and a series of lawsuits connected to a 2024 wave of attacks on customer accounts.

Early life and education

Ramaswamy was born on 26 February 1967 in Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India. He attended high school at National College in Bangalore, India, before studying computer science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Technology degree in July 1989.

He then entered the doctoral program in computer science at Brown University in the United States, receiving a Master of Science degree in 1991. He completed his PhD in May 1995 with a dissertation titled "Indexing for Data Models with Classes and Constraints," examining input/output-efficient indexing structures for database systems that incorporated concepts from constraint programming. His doctoral advisor was Paris C. Kanellakis, a computer scientist known for his work on database theory, and his dissertation committee included Brown computer science faculty member Thomas W. Doeppner Jr.

Career

Early industrial research, 1995 to 2003

After completing his doctorate, Ramaswamy held research positions in database analytics at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies and Bell Communications Research (Bellcore). He subsequently joined the customer relationship management software company E.piphany as director of engineering for the company's analytic platform, working on machine learning systems.

Google, 2003 to 2018

Google began recruiting engineers from E.piphany, and Ramaswamy joined Google in April 2003 to work on the back-end infrastructure of AdWords, the company's search advertising system. His early role focused on the algorithms that determined the ranking of advertisements on Google's search results pages, work that shaped how the company priced and ordered search ads relative to rivals. He rose through Google's engineering organisation over the following decade, holding the titles of vice president of engineering and, later, senior vice president of engineering, in addition to running organic search infrastructure and Google's travel and shopping search teams.

Internally, Ramaswamy also opposed a proposal within Google to mine the search histories of Google account holders to improve advertisement targeting on non-Google websites, a dispute reported to have pitted him against other senior executives. During this period Ramaswamy and Susan Wojcicki, another senior Google advertising executive, were both responsible for parts of the advertising business, and the two were described as having had heated disagreements in front of Google's senior staff over the direction of the ads organisation.

In March 2013 Ramaswamy was promoted to senior vice president of advertising and commerce, taking charge of all of Google's advertising systems, including monetisation of YouTube. By 2018, Google's advertising business generated roughly $115 billion a year and accounted for the large majority of parent company Alphabet Inc.'s revenue; in the second quarter of that year advertising made up 86 percent of Alphabet's $32.65 billion in quarterly revenue.

Ramaswamy's advertising unit also oversaw monetisation of YouTube, and he later described a persistent conflict between maximising advertising revenue on the video platform and keeping advertisements away from unsuitable content. In November 2017, after a British newspaper published examples of advertisements from major brands including Deutsche Bank, Amazon, eBay and Adidas appearing on YouTube videos that sexualised children, Ramaswamy said he reached "a breaking point." He later told The New York Times: "This is an impossible conflict and we kind of muddled our way through it. All of us have boundaries for what we will tolerate in our jobs. There comes a point where you say the environment I am working in has a situation that is not acceptable to me." He said he decided the following month, December 2017, that he "needed to do something different" with his life, citing his conclusion that an advertising-supported business model had inherent limitations.

Ramaswamy left Google on 1 October 2018. He was succeeded as head of Google's advertising and commerce organisation by Prabhakar Raghavan, then a Google vice president of engineering; Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said he could "think of no better person to lead our monetization efforts" than Raghavan. In a blog post announcing his departure, Ramaswamy wrote that he had "always been drawn to earlier stage entrepreneurial projects" and was joining Greylock Partners as a venture partner to pursue them. Before leaving Google he had also made angel investments, including in the startup Leap AI. Throughout his time running Google's advertising business, Ramaswamy was known for keeping a low public profile and rarely speaking to the press, and for being direct with subordinates, whom he expected to operate in what was described as a "sink or swim" environment.

Greylock Partners, 2018 to 2024

Ramaswamy joined Greylock Partners as a venture partner in October 2018 and held that position, in parallel with his later roles, until February 2024. From August 2017 to December 2019 he also served as a member of the board of directors of the cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, Inc.

Founding and leading Neeva, 2019 to 2023

In 2019 Ramaswamy founded Neeva Inc. in Mountain View, California, together with Vivek Raghunathan, a former Google colleague who had worked with him on search and YouTube advertising and had been the first technical lead of what became Google Assistant. Neeva was built as a subscription-funded search engine that carried no advertisements and did not use customer search data for advertising purposes, positioning it as an alternative to Google Search. Ramaswamy served as Neeva's founder and chief executive from January 2019 until May 2023.

Neeva's early technology combined a search index licensed from Microsoft Bing with weather data from weather.com, stock information from Intrinio and mapping data from Apple, while allowing users to connect personal accounts such as Gmail, Microsoft Office and Dropbox so that Neeva could search personal files alongside the public web. The company began an invitation-only test in June 2020 and had around 25 full-time employees that year. It raised $37.5 million in its first funding round, with equal investments from Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital and Ramaswamy himself. In March 2021 Neeva announced an additional $40 million round led by Greylock and Sequoia, bringing its total funding to $77.5 million at a $300 million valuation; by then the company employed about 45 people, roughly a dozen of them former Google employees, and had added Google's former head of search, Udi Manber, as a part-time adviser and Google's former president of the Americas, Margo Georgiadis, to its board.

Describing his reasons for leaving advertising for a subscription model, Ramaswamy told Forbes: "Sometimes I joke with people: Listen, all of us pay for the water that comes through our tap. And they just don't care. Because you know what? It's a low-cost, high-quality product. Why don't online services work the same way?" In a 2021 interview with The Indian Express, he said Neeva's founders believed that "at scale an ad-supported product serves the company that shows you ads, it does not serve you," and pointed to the increasing number of advertisements Google had added to its mobile search results pages over time. He added: "We guarantee the product and company are designed so that personal data is indexed to serve your results, your data is used to serve you better results and for nothing else."

Neeva launched publicly in the United States in 2021, reporting 600,000 users, and expanded to the United Kingdom, France and Germany on 5 October 2022, with a planned UK subscription price of around £5 a month. Ramaswamy told the BBC that the technology sector had become "exploitative" of people's data and said of Google: "We felt the traditional search engines had become about advertising and advertisers, and not really about serving users. Google has a dominant position in the marketplace, and the incentive for them to truly innovate, to truly create disruptive experiences, is not really there." An analyst interviewed for the same article was sceptical that Neeva could dent Google's dominance of search.

In 2023, Neeva discontinued its consumer search engine and shifted its focus toward enterprise applications of large language models. Snowflake Inc. announced its acquisition of Neeva on 24 May 2023, saying the deal would help Snowflake customers and developers build search and conversational features into their data applications; the company's then chief executive, Frank Slootman, said "engaging with data through natural language is becoming popular with advancements in AI," and Snowflake's product executive Christian Kleinerman said "the folks at Neeva are the ones that have the power to help us accelerate efforts." According to a regulatory filing reported by CNBC, Snowflake paid approximately $185 million for Neeva. Neeva's total funding at the time of the acquisition, from investors including Sequoia Capital and Ram Shriram, has been reported at $77.5 million.

Senior Vice President, Artificial Intelligence at Snowflake, 2023 to 2024

Following the acquisition, Ramaswamy joined Snowflake as senior vice president of artificial intelligence from May 2023 until his appointment as chief executive in February 2024. His Neeva co-founder, Vivek Raghunathan, also joined Snowflake and, as of the company's 2026 annual meeting, served as Snowflake's senior vice president of engineering.

Chief executive officer of Snowflake, 2024 to present

Effective 27 February 2024, Frank Slootman retired as chief executive officer of Snowflake and Ramaswamy was appointed to succeed him; Slootman remained chairman of the company's board, and Ramaswamy became a Class III member of the board. At the time of his appointment Ramaswamy was 57 years old. Slootman said in a statement: "There is no better person than Sridhar to lead Snowflake into this next phase of growth and deliver on the opportunity ahead in AI and machine learning. He is a visionary technologist with a proven track record of running and scaling successful businesses."

Snowflake announced the leadership change alongside its fourth-quarter and full-year results for the fiscal year ended 31 January 2024. Fourth-quarter revenue was $774.7 million, up 32 percent year over year, with product revenue of $738.1 million, up 33 percent, while the fourth-quarter operating loss widened to $275.5 million from $239.8 million a year earlier; the company also guided first-quarter product revenue below analysts' expectations. Snowflake shares fell more than 20 percent in extended trading following the announcement, sliding as much as 24 percent, cutting into a market capitalisation that had stood at about $75 billion before the announcement.

Under the terms of an amended and restated offer letter dated 27 February 2024, Ramaswamy's employment as chief executive has an initial three-year term on an at-will basis. It set his annual base salary at $750,000 and his target annual cash bonus at 100 percent of base salary, subject to performance goals set by Snowflake's compensation committee. The offer letter also provided for appointment equity awards consisting of a stock option valued at $75,000,000 that vests over five years in 60 equal monthly instalments, a performance-based restricted stock award valued at $20,000,000 that vests on terms consistent with Snowflake's other fiscal year 2025 executive grants, and a restricted stock unit award valued at $5,000,000 that would only be granted after Ramaswamy purchased at least $5,000,000 of Snowflake stock on the open market by 29 March 2024, vesting thereafter in 16 equal quarterly instalments. Ramaswamy was also made a participant in Snowflake's severance and change-in-control plan as a "Tier 1 Covered Employee."

Reflecting the scale of these appointment awards, Snowflake's summary compensation table reported Ramaswamy's total compensation for the fiscal year ended 31 January 2025, his first full fiscal year as chief executive, at $101,325,374, of which $74,764,494 was attributed to the grant-date value of stock option awards and $25,047,811 to other stock awards, against a base salary of $725,137. For the fiscal year ended 31 January 2026, with no new appointment-related awards, his reported total compensation fell to $22,310,492, comprising his $750,000 base salary, $772,407 in non-equity incentive plan compensation and $20,787,461 in stock awards. Snowflake's proxy statement calculated the ratio of this fiscal year 2026 total compensation to the company's median employee compensation of $330,699.

As of the notice of Snowflake's 2026 annual meeting, filed 18 May 2026, Ramaswamy continued to serve as Snowflake's chief executive officer and as a Class III director, and was nominated for re-election to the board at the company's annual meeting scheduled for 29 June 2026, for a term running until 2029. The proxy statement listed him, together with Snowflake co-founder Benoit Dageville and former chief executive Frank Slootman, as one of three directors the board did not consider independent because of his employment by the company.

Snowflake's most recent quarterly results at the time of publication, for the quarter ended 31 July 2026 and reported on 2 September 2026, showed revenue of $1.55 billion, up 35 percent year over year, and product revenue of $1.49 billion, up 37 percent year over year, Snowflake's third consecutive quarter of product revenue growth acceleration. The company reported a net revenue retention rate of 126 percent, 828 customers with more than $1 million in trailing 12-month product revenue (up 27 percent year over year), 829 Forbes Global 2000 customers, and remaining performance obligations of $9.00 billion, up 30 percent year over year; it raised its full-year product revenue growth guidance to 36 percent. Ramaswamy said in the results announcement: "Snowflake delivered another strong quarter, with product revenue of $1.49 billion, up 37% year-over-year, as the company continues to power the enterprise AI revolution. AI continues to compound our advantages, creating a flywheel effect across the business... The Agentic Enterprise runs on the company, and we're just getting started."

Leadership and management style

Colleagues and reporters who covered Ramaswamy's tenure running Google's advertising business described him as blunt and willing to openly disagree with colleagues and subordinates, with an approach to managing subordinates characterised as "sink or swim." He was reported to have clashed repeatedly and openly with fellow Google advertising executive Susan Wojcicki, including in front of Google's senior staff, and the two were described as struggling to be in a room together. At the same time, he was described as keeping a low public profile within the industry, rarely giving interviews despite running a business that generated tens of billions of dollars a year.

At Neeva, Ramaswamy positioned himself as a critic of the advertising-funded business model he had spent fifteen years building at Google, arguing that at scale, an advertising-supported product inevitably serves the advertiser rather than the user. The New York Times described him in a 2020 interview as "measured and cerebral," noting that in person he came across "very much like the academic teaching computer science" he had been before joining Google. He said that during his years running Google's advertising business, growing revenue was treated internally as an unquestioned priority: "The core idea that you have to help revenue grow and that was important to the company's success were not things you questioned. I'm not defending this. I was very much a part of this."

At an industry conference in May 2015, while still at Google, Ramaswamy publicly challenged Facebook's advertising metrics, asking "how many of Facebook's video views are engaged views?" and noting that Facebook counted a view after three seconds of attention compared with a roughly 30-second threshold at YouTube.

Major deals and strategic decisions

Snowflake's acquisition of Ramaswamy's own company, Neeva, on 24 May 2023 for approximately $185 million was completed while Ramaswamy was still Neeva's chief executive and shortly before he joined the company as an executive. As chief executive, Ramaswamy has overseen a series of further acquisitions aimed at building out Snowflake's artificial intelligence and data infrastructure products. On 25 November 2024, Snowflake acquired Datavolo, Inc., a privately held company that built dataflow infrastructure for the creation, management and observability of multimodal data pipelines. On 6 June 2025, the company acquired Crunchy Data Solutions, Inc., a provider of PostgreSQL database technology, for $164.5 million in cash. On 2 February 2026, Snowflake acquired the remainder of Observe, Inc., an AI-powered observability platform in which it had previously held a noncontrolling equity interest, in a transaction with preliminary purchase consideration of approximately $596.2 million; the company said it acquired Observe primarily for its technology and personnel. One Snowflake director, Mr. Burton, resigned from the board effective 30 January 2026 in connection with the Observe acquisition.

By the September 2026 earnings announcement, Snowflake highlighted expanding adoption of two artificial intelligence products, "CoCo" and "CoWork," reporting more than 9,100 CoCo accounts, including over 2,000 added in a single quarter, and 5,800 CoWork accounts, alongside newer offerings including "Cortex Sense" and a "Cortex AI Gateway" that incorporated the company's Natoma integration. The company said it had launched more than 330 product capabilities to general availability in the first half of its 2027 fiscal year, up 35 percent year over year.

Financial and market performance

In the fiscal year ended 31 January 2024, the last full fiscal year before Ramaswamy became chief executive, Snowflake reported revenue of $2.81 billion and a net loss of $838 million. In the fiscal year ended 31 January 2025, Ramaswamy's first full fiscal year as chief executive, revenue rose to $3.6 billion and the company had 7,834 employees across 34 countries; net loss was $1.29 billion. In the fiscal year ended 31 January 2026, revenue rose again to $4.7 billion and headcount grew to 9,060 employees across 36 countries, of whom 2,424 worked in research and development; net loss was $1.33 billion. the company's common stock closed at $192.70 per share on 30 January 2026, the last trading day of that fiscal year.

For the second quarter of fiscal year 2027, ended 31 July 2026, Snowflake reported revenue of $1.55 billion, up 35 percent year over year, product revenue of $1.49 billion, up 37 percent, a net revenue retention rate of 126 percent, and remaining performance obligations of $9.00 billion, up 30 percent, and it added 692 net new customers in the quarter.

Board memberships and outside roles

Ramaswamy served as a member of the board of directors of Palo Alto Networks, Inc., a cybersecurity company, from August 2017 to December 2019. Since February 2024 he has served on Snowflake's own board of directors as a Class III director, a seat that under the company's governance is tied to his employment as chief executive rather than treated as an independent directorship.

Controversies

Ramaswamy's compensation as Snowflake's newly appointed chief executive became a focus of shareholder criticism. At the company's 2025 annual meeting, the non-binding advisory vote on executive compensation, known as "say-on-pay," received support from only approximately 30 percent of votes cast. the company's board and compensation committee subsequently conducted an outreach campaign in autumn 2025, contacting 38 of the company's largest institutional stockholders, representing more than half of the company's outstanding shares, and meeting with twelve of them. According to the company's 2026 proxy statement, stockholders identified the size of the equity awards granted to Ramaswamy in connection with his February 2024 appointment as the primary driver of the low say-on-pay vote, along with a broader desire for stronger performance-based alignment in executive equity awards; the company said this feedback led it to make 70 percent of the intended equity value of Ramaswamy's fiscal year 2026 "refresh" grants performance-based.

Snowflake has faced securities litigation connected to the leadership transition and its financial disclosures. On 29 February 2024, a stockholder class action was filed against the company, its former chief executive officer and its former chief financial officer in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging violations of Sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934; a second amended complaint was filed in April 2025, and in February 2026 the court granted the company's motion to dismiss that complaint while giving the plaintiffs leave to file a third amended complaint. Five related derivative lawsuits alleging similar claims were also filed in Delaware and California courts against the company and certain of its directors and executive officers. The 10-K identifies the defendants in the original securities suit as the company and its former, not current, chief executive and chief financial officer.

Beginning in May 2024, shortly after Ramaswamy became chief executive, Snowflake said it became aware that a cybersecurity threat actor had accessed a number of customer accounts on its platform. The company has stated that the access resulted from customers' own failure to implement security measures such as multi-factor authentication and network access policies, rather than any vulnerability in the company's own systems, and that additional, similar attacks on customer accounts continued to be reported after May 2024. Beginning on 13 June 2024, a series of class action lawsuits was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Montana and elsewhere in the United States and Canada against the company and affected customers, alleging that the company failed to take reasonable measures to secure systems containing consumer data. These cases were consolidated into multidistrict litigation in the District of Montana on 4 October 2024. An amended complaint filed on 20 May 2025 added claims relating to the exposure of personally identifiable information from the Los Angeles Unified School District that had been held in a breached Snowflake customer account. The court denied the company's motions to dismiss the claims of both consumer and financial-institution plaintiffs on 28 and 29 October 2025, and the company filed its answers in December 2025, with the litigation continuing in discovery; a related class action was also pending in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. the company has said it intends to vigorously defend against these claims.

Separately, on 21 November 2025, a class action was filed against Snowflake in the District of Montana alleging copyright infringement on behalf of a putative class of copyright holders whose work was allegedly copied or used without authorisation to train the company's large language model; the company filed its answer to the complaint on 22 January 2026.

Personal life

Ramaswamy has generally kept a low public profile relative to the size of the businesses he has run, rarely giving interviews during his years at Google despite overseeing a business that generated tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue. He moved from India to the United States in 1989 to begin graduate study at Brown University.

See also

• Snowflake Inc.
• Neeva
• Frank Slootman
• Google
• Alphabet Inc.
• Greylock Partners

External links

• Snowflake Inc. filings, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission