Filing: ahead of Snowflake's IPO, Salesforce and Berkshire Hathaway both commit to buy $250M worth of Snowflake stock; IPO range to value it at ~$21B-$23.7B
Appeal of the cloud data storage platform lies not only in its triple-digit sales growth Jessica Bursztynsky / CNBC : Snowflake IPO gets vote of confidence as Berkshire, Salesforce agree to buy shares PYMNTS.com : Berkshire Hathaway To Buy $570M Stake In Cloud Computing Firm Snowflake Richard Waters / Financial Times : Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway to invest $570m in Snowflake Steve Muchoki / Coinspeaker : Berkshire Hathaway and Salesforce Purchase $500M Worth of Snowflake Stock at IPO Set Price Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE : Snowflake sets IPO price range, gets backing from Berkshire Hathaway and Salesforce Tweets: James Wang / @jwangark : So Berkshire has gone from not willing to pay >10x earnings to paying >30x sales. Cool. https://www.google.com/... Ari Levy / @levynews : Buffett getting in on IPO game is fascinating. How much is for the expected pop? It's at least worth asking. At $80, the investment values Snowflake at $22.3 bln. Where does it open? Also interesting - Buffett buying shares from ex-CEO Bob Muglia https://www.cnbc.com/... Kanishk Kapur / @kanishkkapur_ : (1/10) BRK is investing $573M at the IPO price in $SNOW. This is not surprising given the user metrics. It marks $BRK's entry into enterprise software. More on why this investment is significant 👇 https://techcrunch.com/...... Eghosa Omoigui / @eghosao : Snowflake trading post-IPO at 70x est 2020 revenues ($35b market cap, give or take) is peak 2020. What's not to love? Berkshire is all in https://www.cnbc.com/... $snow Jordan Novet / @jordannovet : must say i did not think Snowflake would be raising more than $2 billion its IPO https://www.cnbc.com/... @cnbcdisruptors : Snowflake's debut received a vote of confidence today as Berkshire Hathaway and Salesforce agree to purchase $250 million of stock at the IPO price. The #Disruptor50 company is expected to begin trading this year under the ticker symbol $SNOW. https://www.cnbc.com/... Shomik Ghosh / @shomikghosh21 : I can't honestly say I wasn't expecting 2020 to deliver Berkshire investing in SaaS 😲 Probably clearest example of a company on path to be next $100B+ enterprise software company is SNOW but truly incredible to see https://techcrunch.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Snowflake's August S-1 showed first-half revenue more than doubling to $242M, and this filing adds the demand side of the story: Berkshire Hathaway and Salesforce are each committing $250M at the IPO price, locking in $500M of the deal before marketing even begins at a $21B–$23.7B range.
The pairing matters because it is cross-spectrum validation — Warren Buffett's value vehicle alongside a strategic cloud-software buyer — and the confidence proved contagious: within a week Snowflake raised its expected price by around 30% and then closed a $3.4B raise valuing it above $44B, the largest software IPO on record.
First-order effects
- Snowflake enters roadshow week with half a billion dollars of its offering pre-committed at the IPO price, materially de-risking pricing against its initial $21B–$23.7B range.
- Salesforce secures a large strategic position in the data platform sitting adjacent to its CRM stack, while Berkshire takes its most prominent software-growth bet at exit.
Second-order effects
- The anchor signal feeds directly into repricing: the updated S-1 lifts the range by roughly 30%, and the eventual $3.4B raise at a $44B+ valuation hands early holders outsized paper gains — Sutter Hill's stake alone marking $5.9B at the IPO price.
- Rival late-stage cloud-data companies get a fresh public-market benchmark, raising the bar for what growth metrics a software listing must show to command similar multiples.
Third-order effects
- If anchor-commitment filings become the template, mega software IPOs will increasingly be underwritten by strategic buyers and blue-chip capital before retail demand is even tested, concentrating allocations among insiders rather than open-market investors.
- For Berkshire, participation signals traditional value capital adapting to a market where triple-digit-growth cloud platforms are the scarce assets — a posture that reshapes which companies can clear the scale needed to become hyperscaler-class buyers like the one Snowflake had grown into by its 2026 commitment to spend $6B on AWS.
The trend: Mega software offerings are increasingly pre-underwritten by strategic and blue-chip anchor investors whose commitments set the pricing floor and fuel record raises.