Snowflake Ecosystem M&A – Research Report

Exclusive analysis of Snowflake partner M&A reveals ownership trends, active buyers, valuations, and what specialist data consultancies should know before selling.

Snowflake closed its fiscal 2026 with 13,328 customers, 654 of them spending over $1m a year, and wide implementation partner network. Almost none of that implementation work is done by Snowflake itself. It is done by the services partners sitting between the platform and the enterprise and over the last twenty-four months those firms have become some of the most sought-after assets in IT services.

We screened the Snowflake services partner directory and traced ownership, funding and transaction history for every firm in it. This article summarises what we found. The full dataset, including the complete transaction list and acquirer profiles, is available in the gated report below.

A narrow pyramid, still mostly founder-owned

Snowflake sorts its services partners into three tiers: Select, Premier and Elite, with placement driven by certifications, closed pipeline, deal registrations and referenceable customer outcomes. The result is a very steep pyramid, a shape our partner ecosystem research finds in every gated platform channel. Of the 1,000+ services partners we identified, the overwhelming majority sit in Select. Only 93 hold Elite status, and a far smaller group of the directory are genuine Snowflake pure-plays, meaning firms whose revenue, hiring and go-to-market are organised around the platform rather than treating it as one vendor among twenty.

The pattern we found is consistent and worth stating plainly: the higher a partner sits in the tier pyramid, the more likely it already has an institutional owner. Elite partners are disproportionately PE-backed or already inside a strategic. Select-tier firms are almost entirely founder-owned. The scarce, investable middle, a specialist with 50 to 400 consultants, Premier or Elite status, and a real delivery track record, is the profile buyers are competing for, and it is emptying out fast.

Three of the most visible Snowflake pure-plays in the ecosystem: phData, Hakkoda and kipi.ai, all changed hands inside a fifteen-month window.

Who is buying Snowflake partners, and why

Buyers in this ecosystem fall into three groups with genuinely different motivations, and they value the same company differently.

1. Private equity building data & AI platforms

Mid-market funds are using Snowflake specialists as platform assets for buy-and-build. Gryphon Investors’ majority growth recapitalisation of phData in December 2024 is the clearest example: one of the largest pure-play data engineering firms globally, a Snowflake Elite partner, recapitalised with management retaining meaningful equity. Recognize’s $100m minority investment into Blend360 followed the same logic from a different starting point: fund a services platform, then buy specialist capability into it.

2. Strategic acquirers and global integrators

The large integrators cannot hire Snowflake capability at the speed the market is asking for it, so they acquire companies in the high-growth segments of the market. 

• IBM acquired Hakkoda in April 2025, folding several hundred Snowflake-certified consultants into IBM Consulting. 
• WNS acquired kipi.ai in March 2025, picking up roughly 600 SnowPro certifications and an Elite partnership; WNS guided that kipi would contribute around 2% of group revenue in fiscal 2026.

Strategic investors buy certified headcount, and access to a fast-growing segment of the IT services market, which is otherwise stagnant.

3. Sponsor-backed consolidators doing tuck-ins

This is the fastest-moving group and the one most sellers underestimate. In June 2026, weeks after achieving Snowflake Elite status itself, Blend360 acquired In516ht, a 90-person Snowflake Elite data engineering consultancy in Ljubljana with delivery arms in Dubai and Riyadh. Buying a sub-100-person specialist to acquire tier status, a nearshore delivery base and a geography in one move has been a standard move in the IT services space across the past years.

Case study: Hakkoda, from stealth launch to IBM in under four years

Hakkoda is the cleanest illustration of how quickly value can be built and realised in this niche.

• July-November 2021: founded by former Deloitte leader Erik Duffield with a co-founding team out of the same practice, operating quietly before a public launch. Backed from the start by Tercera, a fund built specifically to fund cloud-ecosystem consultancies.
• 2021-2024: roughly $19.6m raised across two rounds. Deliberately narrow positioning: Snowflake first, with delivery hubs in Latin America, Portugal and India.
• 2024: Snowflake Healthcare and Life Sciences Services Partner of the Year, specializing in a mature, rich industry.
• April 2025: acquired by IBM at roughly 350 employees. Terms undisclosed.

Under four years from stealth to a strategic exit, with modest capital consumed. The lesson is not that everyone can repeat it. It is what IBM was buying: a single-platform brand, certified bench depth, named industry verticals, and an offshore delivery footprint that made the margin profile defensible. Those four attributes, not headcount alone, are what separates the assets that trade from the ones that get politely admired.

Selected Snowflake ecosystem transactions

Selected publicly disclosed transactions. The full list, including undisclosed and minority deals, is in the report.

Snowflake partner valuations

Almost no Snowflake partner transaction discloses a multiple, so the honest way to value one is to look at where the wider data & analytics services segment trades. Across 1,069 disclosed control transactions in IT services from January 2015 to June 2026, data & analytics is the highest-valued subsector we track.

EV/EBITDA multiples, control transactions, Jan 2015 – Jun 2026. Source: Aventis Advisors IT Services Valuation Multiples.

A median of 16.3x EBITDA, against 10.4x for IT services overall, with a first quartile above 10x. The practical implication for Snowflake consultancies: a specialist data and AI firm is valued on the data & analytics comp set. A generalist IT services business with a Snowflake practice inside it is valued on IT consulting comps: 9.8x median. That framing decision, made 12 to 18 months before a process starts, is often worth more than anything that happens during the process.

What sellers need to know

Data and AI readiness is one of the few areas of IT services still expected to grow through the current cycle. Enterprises cannot deploy AI on top of an unusable data estate, and Snowflake partners are the ones doing that groundwork. That is why buyers are paying up while the rest of IT services valuations fall.

The genuine dilemma is timing. Sell now into a buyer set that is actively competing, or spend two more years building scale and risk a colder market. There is no one-size-fits-all answer, but there is a specific one for your business, and it depends on which of the three buyer groups above you are actually a fit for.

Get the full picture

This article is a summary. The full Snowflake Ecosystem M&A Research Report contains:

• Market Landscape
• The full transaction list: every acquisition and investment we could trace involving Snowflake-focused partners, including deals never picked up by the trade press
• Acquirer profiles: which PE funds and strategics are building data platforms, what they have bought, and the pattern in what they pay for

Prefer to skip the report and talk about what this means for your company specifically? Get in touch with us and we can walk through where you would sit in the range and who the realistic buyers are.