Snowflake to acquire Crunchy Data to enhance Postgres for AI

Snowflake has announced its intent to acquire Crunchy Data, a provider of open source Postgres technology and products, to bring a fully enterprise-ready PostgreSQL offering to its AI Data Cloud.

The acquisition aims to deliver Snowflake Postgres, a database platform designed to enable developers with PostgreSQL compatibility while maintaining governance, security, and operational standards necessary for enterprise-grade and mission-critical AI applications.

Businesses in a range of industries have shown growing demand for a secure, enterprise-ready PostgreSQL solution for their core applications. The proposed integration of Crunchy Data into Snowflake Postgres intends to address these needs, offering production-ready compatibility within environments such as those compliant with FedRAMP regulations.

The popularity of PostgreSQL is reflected by its adoption rate, with 49% of developers reportedly using the database. Snowflake's new Postgres offering is expected to streamline how developers build, deploy, and scale AI agents and applications by leveraging Crunchy Data's existing technology, engineered for all stages of the enterprise workload lifecycle.

Key features provided by Crunchy Data include access to essential performance metrics, scalable architecture, and a user-friendly interface, which Snowflake aims to bring to developers creating AI-driven enterprise applications within its platform.

Organisations currently using PostgreSQL, including existing Snowflake partners such as Blue Yonder and LandingAI, are expected to benefit from accelerated development and operational efficiency as they adapt to the evolving use of AI agents in business processes.

"Our vision is to deliver the world's most trusted and comprehensive data and AI platform to our customers. Today's announcement of our proposed acquisition of Crunchy Data represents another reason why Snowflake is the ultimate destination for all enterprise data and AI needs. We're tackling a massive USD $350 billion market opportunity and a real need for our customers to bring Postgres to the Snowflake AI Data Cloud," Vivek Raghunathan, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Snowflake, commented.

"We built Crunchy Data with the vision to become a Postgres solution of choice for leading enterprise organizations. Our deep-rooted commitment to stringent security and comprehensive compliance has made us the trusted Postgres partner for organisations across regulated industries, including federal agencies, Fortune 500 financial institutions and high-scale SaaS companies. We're excited to join forces with Snowflake to provide their customers who already rely on Postgres the ability to run mission-critical regulated workloads with increased confidence and security on the Snowflake platform," Paul Laurence, Co-Founder at Crunchy Data, said.

After the acquisition, Snowflake intends to maintain support for Crunchy Data's existing customer base and participate actively in the PostgreSQL community while integrating Crunchy Data's capabilities with its own products. Crunchy Data's expertise is seen as complementing Snowflake's Unistore, which combines transactional and analytical data handling, by providing a transactional solution that fully embraces PostgreSQL compatibility.

"Snowflake's platform serves as the foundation for Blue Yonder's vast amount of supply chain data. Bringing PostgreSQL technology into the Snowflake ecosystem is an opportunity for our development teams to accelerate and simplify benefits for our customers," Blue Yonder's Senior Vice President of Generative AI, Chris Burchett, commented.

"Access to a PostgreSQL database directly within Snowflake has the potential to be incredibly impactful for our team and our customers, as it would allow us to securely deploy our Snowflake Native App, LandingLens, into our customers' account. This integration is a key building block in making it simpler to build, deploy, and run AI applications directly on the Snowflake platform," Dan Maloney, Chief Executive Officer of LandingAI, highlighted.

Snowflake Postgres will initially be launched in private preview. The closing of the acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and standard closing conditions.