Snowflake shares plunge 12% on guidance miss, acquisition of search startup Neeva

Published

3 years ago

May 24, 2023

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The New York Stock Exchange welcomes Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW), on Tues. Dec 21st, 2021, to usher in the first day of winter.

NYSE

Shares of cloud data platform provider Snowflake slid more than 12% in extended trading on Wednesday after the company issued weak guidance in its earnings report and said it will acquire search startup Neeva for an undisclosed amount.

Here’s how the company did:

Earnings per share: 15 cents, adjusted, vs. 5 cents expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv
Revenue: $624 million vs. $608 million expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv

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The company’s revenue grew 48% year over year in the first quarter of fiscal 2024, but that growth was lower than the 85% increase in the prior-year fiscal quarter. The bulk of Snowflake sales come from product revenue, which expanded 50% year over year. Product revenue accounts for use of Snowflake’s software for storing and running queries on data stored in its system.

Snowflake said it anticipates product revenue will be between $620 million and $625 million in the fiscal second quarter. That would represent year-over-year growth between 33% and 34%.That projection came in well below the StreetAccount estimate of $649 million.

For the 2024 fiscal year, Snowflake called for product revenue of $2.6 billion. The StreetAccount consensus was $2.7 billion.

Snowflake posted a net loss of $225.6 million, or 70 cents per share, compared with a loss of $165.8 million, or 53 cents per share, during the year-earlier period.

Snowflake also announced it plans to acquire Neeva, the privacy-focused search company co-founded by former Google executive Sridhar Ramaswamy.

Benoit Dageville, Snowflake’s co-founder and president of products, wrote in a blog post that the company intends to “infuse and leverage” Neeva’s AI-equipped search products across its cloud services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“Neeva allows us to tap into some of the most cutting-edge search technologies available to bring search and conversation in Snowflake to a new level,” Dageville wrote.

The acquisition comes days after Neeva, which was founded in 2019, said it would shut down its consumer search engine to focus on developing use cases for AI and large language models.

The company will hold its quarterly call with investors Wednesday at 5 p.m. ET.

Clarification: The year-over-year sales increase of 85% occurred in the first quarter of fiscal 2023. An earlier version misstated the time frame.

— CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed reporting to this article.

Technology

Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup’s robots could ‘fracture a human skull’

Published

13 hours ago

November 21, 2025

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$Figure AI sued by whistleblower who warned that startup's robots could 'fracture a human skull'$

Startup Figure AI is developing general-purpose humanoid robots.

Figure AI

Figure AI, an Nvidia-backed developer of humanoid robots, was sued by the startup’s former head of product safety who alleged that he was wrongfully terminated after warning top executives that the company’s robots “were powerful enough to fracture a human skull.”

Robert Gruendel, a principal robotic safety engineer, is the plaintiff in the suit filed Friday in a federal court in the Northern District of California. Gruendel’s attorneys describe their client as a whistleblower who was fired in September, days after lodging his “most direct and documented safety complaints.”

The suit lands two months after Figure was valued at $39 billion in a funding round led by Parkway Venture Capital. That’s a 15-fold increase in valuation from early 2024, when the company raised a round from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft.

In the complaint, Gruendel’s lawyers say the plaintiff warned Figure CEO Brett Adcock and Kyle Edelberg, chief engineer, about the robot’s lethal capabilities, and said one “had already carved a ¼-inch gash into a steel refrigerator door during a malfunction.”

The complaint also says Gruendel warned company leaders not to “downgrade” a “safety road map” that he had been asked to present to two prospective investors who ended up funding the company.

Gruendel worried that a “product safety plan which contributed to their decision to invest” had been “gutted” the same month Figure closed the investment round, a move that “could be interpreted as fraudulent,” the suit says.

The plaintiff’s concerns were “treated as obstacles, not obligations,” and the company cited a “vague ‘change in business direction’ as the pretext” for his termination, according to the suit.

Gruendel is seeking economic, compensatory and punitive damages and demanding a jury trial.

Figure didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Nor did attorneys for Gruendel.

The humanoid robot market remains nascent today, with companies like Tesla and Boston Dynamics pursuing futuristic offerings, alongside Figure, while China’s Unitree Robotics is preparing for an IPO. Morgan Stanley said in a report in May that adoption is “likely to accelerate in the 2030s” and could top $5 trillion by 2050.

Read the filing here: