Customers can store and manage data in the cloud without vendor lock-in. A startup called Streamlit developed a popular open source project for building data-based apps. It seems like a good match, and today it was announced that it was acquiring Streamlit for $800 million.
Beno Dageville, co-founder and president of products at Snowflake, said the company became familiar with Streamlit as customers were using it, as were people in-house, and as they talked it seemed increasingly like a good fit. I would describe it as making it easy to interact with data, according to Dageville.
He said that Streamlit fills in a big missing piece in the platform by allowing data scientists and others to interact with the data and build apps that bring the data to life for non-technical users. The native data visualization piece is what Streamlit is getting with, because they lacked the technical pieces for accessing and managing the data in the cloud.
Streamlit reaches 1.0 milestone for open source data app building tool
Streamlit co-founder and CEO Adrien Treuille said that he and his co-founders began talking to Snowflake last fall and over time it became obvious that they would match up well together, not just technologically, but also culturally.
The idea for the startup was to build an open source project to make it easier to build custom applications that interact with data. At the time of the launch, they wanted to build a flexible tool.
“I think that Streamlit actually has, I would say, a unique position in this market. While most companies are basically trying to systemize some part of the machine learning workflow, we’re giving engineers these sort of Lego blocks to build whatever they want,” Treuille explained.
It was working on a commercial cloud service when it reached version 1.0 last October. The piece will eventually be part of the platform. The company plans to integrate the Streamlit technology into the platform, but the plan is to continue to build and support the popular open source project. There are tens of thousands of people using the platform and millions of apps built on top of Streamlit.
The company went public in September 2020. Streamlit raised $62 million.
The deal will have to pass regulatory muster. The hope is that it gets done sooner than later, but Dageville said that it would be up to the various regulatory bodies. The stock is down almost 23% in after-hours trading.
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