from Hacker News

Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250M

by mfiguiere on 6/2/25, 8:01 PM with 60 comments

  • by neonate on 6/2/25, 8:56 PM

  • by buremba on 6/2/25, 10:47 PM

    It's interesting that Snowflake went shopping for Crunchy Data over Neon. While Neon focused on bringing compute and storage separation to OLTP, Crunchy Data focused more on bringing OLTP/PostgreSQL closer to OLAP with DuckDB and Iceberg.

    In a way, Crunch Data was a competitor to Snowflake as they literally name themselves as "Postgresql Data Warehouse" but correct me if I'm wrong. Neon sounds more complementary to Snowflake as they were struggling with an OLTP backend, namely their Unistore product, which was announced 3 years ago but never went into general availability due to its scalability issues.

    Maybe Neon was 4x more expensive, but this acquisition sounds more like an answer to Databricks than a strategic acquisition if I'm being honest. Apparently, Crunchy had $30M ARR, so it's 8x ARR, which is a cheaper answer to Databricks.

  • by candiddevmike on 6/2/25, 9:11 PM

    > Part of the reason Snowflake and Databricks are interested in database companies is because PostgreSQL can serve as the underlying database for customers to create AI agents with data they store in the companies’ respective platforms.

    I don't understand this part. What does PostgreSQL offer here that these vendors believe they can't add to their existing platform? Is it the ecosystem?

  • by cpard on 6/3/25, 2:24 AM

    There are a couple different reasons that make this acquisition interesting.

    First is their long pursuit of HTAP and the failures around unistore.

    Snowflake wanted to get into transactional workloads for a long time and for good reasons.

    I wonder what will happen to Unistore after this acquisition.

    The other interesting part is ETL/ELT, CDC and the whole business of replicating transactional databases into OLAP.

    What crunchy built with duckdb and iceberg is a potential solution to this problem. A problem that has been painful to solve for a long long time.

    Being able to replicate your transactional database into your data lake or data warehouse without having to deal with Debezium and all the rest of the stuff, is going to make many data teams happy.

  • by chachra on 6/2/25, 8:27 PM

    Bummer that all the postgres serverless providers are getting acquired. First Neon, now this. Hope the innovation and competitive pricing continues!

  • by debarshri on 6/2/25, 10:07 PM

    I think $250M is fairly low. Must be a good deal for snowflake.

  • by film42 on 6/2/25, 9:12 PM

    Congrats to the Crunchy Data team! Thanks for making containerized postgres so easy for years and years. Wish you all the best!

  • by kwillets on 6/2/25, 9:18 PM

    Snowflake is becoming the Juicero of data.

  • by cmcconomy on 6/3/25, 12:54 AM

    I had them mixed up with Citus and was confused since I thought they already belonged to MS!

  • by pella on 6/2/25, 9:24 PM

  • by jrochkind1 on 6/2/25, 10:24 PM

    any guesses as to whether existing products will remain?

  • by SJC_Hacker on 6/3/25, 1:51 AM

    I honestly have no idea what these companies do that makes them so valuable.

    I guess you have to be pretty close to C level at a big company to even understand.