The LSE Directory / Alternative data
Snowflake Marketplace is the data and application exchange built into Snowflake's AI Data Cloud, where customers with a Snowflake account discover, evaluate and access third party data products, Snowflake Native Apps and AI products without building or maintaining their own ingestion pipelines. Access runs on Snowflake's native data sharing architecture, so a dataset a provider lists appears as a live, governed, read only object directly inside the consumer's own account and is queried in place with SQL, Python (Snowpark) or other Snowflake tooling; nothing is copied, exported or moved through a separate API or file transfer. The differentiator versus a conventional data vendor or a generic cloud data exchange is that there is no separate delivery layer to build: because provider and consumer sit in the same platform, updates from the provider are reflected immediately, governance and row level access controls travel with the share, and billing can run through a customer's existing Snowflake spend rather than a new vendor contract. Within financial services this suits quantitative researchers, asset managers and investment teams who want to blend external market or alternative data with their own internal data for research and analytics inside one warehouse, instead of stitching together several vendors' APIs. Snowflake Inc, the company operating the marketplace, was founded in July 2012 in San Mateo, California by Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes and Marcin Zukowski, and went public on the NYSE (ticker SNOW) in September 2020. The marketplace itself launched in June 2019 as Snowflake Data Exchange and was later renamed Snowflake Marketplace as its scope grew from data listings to native apps and AI products. As of mid 2026 it lists over 820 providers and more than 3,400 listings; financial and alternative data providers on it include FactSet, LSEG, S&P Global, ICE Data Services, MSCI, PitchBook (a Morningstar company) and Preqin, alongside Cybersyn, an economic and financial data provider in which Snowflake led a 62.9 million dollar Series A investment. Recent additions include Integrated SaaS listings, which reached general availability at the end of June 2026 and let a customer start a trial of a partner application directly from a marketplace listing, and a Marketplace Capacity Drawdown Program that lets customers apply part of their existing Snowflake spend toward eligible partner listings without a separate procurement process.
