Snowflake Nabs Streamlit for Data Science Apps Posted on : Mar 05 - 2022

Cloud data warehousing giant Snowflake showed it’s serious about Python and data science this week when it announced that it plans to spend $800 million to buy Streamlit, a provider of Python-based tools for rapidly developing interactive data applications on the Web.

Co-founded in San Francisco in 2018 by Adrien Treuille, Amanda Kelly, and Thiago Teixeira, Streamlit develops an open source framework of the same name that allows data scientists and machine learning engineers to create and deploy data applications. The software is compatible with other Python-based frameworks, such as NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, and Scikit-learn, and uses React to render screens on the front-end.

Since debuting about four years ago, Streamlit has collected a devoted following in the data science and machine learning departments at organizations like Stitch Fix, Uber, Yelp, and Google X. Streamlit’s most telling characteristic seems to be speed. Users appear to like how quickly they can go from the scripting stage in a Juypter notebook into a full-blown Web app, replete with all the requisite HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

An experienced data scientist, Treuille was burdened by the time and effort it took to generate a functional app. “Every nontrivial machine learning project is eventually stitched together with bug-ridden and unmaintainable internal tools,” he wrote in the first Streamlit blog post. “So my old Google X friend, Thiago Teixeira, and I began thinking about the following question: What if we could make building tools as easy as writing Python scripts? We wanted machine learning engineers to be able to create beautiful apps without needing a tools team.”

That is essentially what Streamlit has done. The company has raised $62 million over two rounds before engaging with Snowflake in talks about selling the company. Those talks led to Wednesday’s announcement that Snowflake plans to buy the company for $800 million. The deal is subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions. View More