Snowflake to acquire LeapYear to boost data clean room abilities

Cloud-based data warehouse company Snowflake on Tuesday announced its intent to acquire secure data-sharing software provider LeapYear Technologies in an effort to boost its data clean room capabilities.

What is a data clean room?

Data clean rooms are software frameworks that allow different organizations to collaborate on data analysis by allowing multiple parties to analyze data sets without disclosing the raw data to one another.

“To further our mission of mobilizing the world’s data — including some of the most sensitive data — Snowflake is announcing its intent to acquire LeapYear, a differential privacy platform, and bring the LeapYear team and technology into Snowflake to help our customers leverage previously off-limits data,” Carl Perry, director of product management at Snowflake, wrote in a blog post. 

Differential privacy allows for secure data sharing

Differential privacy is a term used to describe systems that allow users to share information about a data set by describing patterns within the data set, without  sharing any individual or personally identifiable information.

The addition of LeapYear’s differential privacy platform to Snowflake will augment its Global Cean Room offerings, Perry wrote.

Data clean rooms have been in demand due to data privacy regulations such as the European Union’s GDPR, as these software frameworks allow enterprises to collaborate and analyze consumer data while still being compliant with regulations.

Another reason for the growing popularity of data clean rooms is that they give  enterprises the ability to analyze large volumes of aggregated data.

“Leaders in the media and advertising industries, such as Disney, NBCUniversal, Acxiom, OpenAP, and Roku use Snowflake Global Data Clean Rooms to open up safe, auditable collaboration opportunities across organizations,” Perry wrote. “This has also opened up new collaboration opportunities for organizations across other industries, like retail and CPG [consumer packaged goods.” 

The market size for data clean rooms stood at $4.4 billion at the end of 2021, data from Transparency Market Research shows.

Several other companies, including AWS, Microsoft, Google and Databricks, also offer  clean room capabilities.

The intent to acquire LeapYear comes just a month after Snowflake agreed to purchase artificial intelligence-based time series forecasting platform provider Myst AI, taking the company’s acquisition count to seven companies in three years.

In August 2022 it bought AI-based document analysis platform Applica, based in Poland, to help enterprises handle unstructured data.

Other acquisitions included Streamlit (March 2022), Polish custom software company Pragmatists (January 2022), Polish digital products development studio Polidea (February 2021), and Canadian data anonymization company CryptoNumerics (July 2020).

San Francisco-based LeapYear Technologies, which was founded in 2014 by Christopher Hockenbrocht, Colton Jang, and Ishaan Nerurkar, has raised $53.2 million in funding to date. Investors in the company include venture capital firms such as Bain Capital and Lightspeed.

As part of the acquisition, LeapYear’s team is expected to join Snowflake, Perry wrote.