Thierry Cruanes is Co-Founder and CTO of Snowflake, a pioneering cloud data platform that has fundamentally redefined the data warehousing industry by separating compute from storage. He is a recognized authority in query optimization and parallel execution, holding over 40 patents in database systems and cloud computing.

Thierry earned a PhD in Computer Science with a focus on Database Systems from Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI) and began his career at Sema Group before spending seven years at the IBM European Center of Applied Mathematics working on data mining technologies. He then spent 13 years at Oracle as an architect, ultimately leading the optimization group for Oracle databases.

A French-born technologist with deep roots in distributed and parallel database systems, Thierry brought rare academic rigor and enterprise-scale engineering experience to Snowflake's architecture, co-founding the company in 2012 alongside Benoit Dageville and Marcin Zukowski. His vision for a cloud-native data warehouse built ground-up for elasticity and concurrency set Snowflake apart from legacy on-premise competitors.

At Snowflake, Thierry has served as CTO since inception, steering the platform's technical strategy across multi-cloud environments including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Under his technical leadership, Snowflake grew from a stealth-mode startup to a publicly traded company serving thousands of enterprises globally.

Snowflake's September 2020 IPO on the NYSE raised $3.4 billion, making it the largest software IPO in U.S. history at the time, with shares more than doubling on the first day of trading. The company has raised over $1.56 billion in pre-IPO funding from investors including Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, and now generates over $4.6 billion in annual revenue.