Snowflake recently announced Sridhar Ramaswamy as the New Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors effective immediately. He will replace Frank Slootman, who decided to retire and step from the helm of the company.

Ramaswamy, who graduated from IIT Madras, joined Snowflake in May 2023 after selling his startup Neeva AI to the data cloud company. He held the position of Senior Vice President of AI at Snowflake.

“There is no better person than Sridhar to lead Snowflake into this next phase of growth and deliver on the opportunity ahead in AI and machine learning. He is a visionary technologist with a proven track record of running and scaling successful businesses. I have the utmost confidence in Sridhar and look forward to working with him as he assumes this new role,” Slootman said.

Back in 2021, Ramaswamy, along with Vivek Raghunathan set out to address the gap in the search engine space and launch an alternative product. In February 2023, Neeva AI launched its search engine powered by generative AI. The LLM-powered search engine challenged Google’s fundamentals and offered an ad-free and privacy-focused search experience.

However, just three months later, data cloud company Snowflake acquired Neeva AI for an undisclosed amount.

In an interaction with AIM last year, Ramaswamy stated that becoming the default search engine in Safari, as it turns out, is an incredibly convoluted endeavour. “In reality, there is no formal process; it all hinges on Cupertino’s (Apple’s) subjective judgement of one’s qualifications. There is no process and it’s pretty tough to create a sustainable business,” he said.

Before this, he also worked with Google for over 15 years and led its USD 115 billion advertising tech division.