The 2020 data and AI landscape

When COVID hit the world a few months ago, an extended period of gloom seemed all but inevitable. Yet many companies in the data ecosystem have not just survived but in fact thrived. Perhaps most emblematic of this is the blockbuster IPO of data warehouse provider Snowflake that took place a couple of weeks ago and catapulted Snowflake to a $69 billion market cap at the time of writing – the biggest software IPO ever (see the S-1 teardown). And Palantir, an often controversial data analytics platform focused on the financial and government sector, became a public company via direct listing, reaching a market cap of $22 billion at the time of writing (see the S-1 teardown). Meanwhile, other recently IPO'ed data companies are performing very well in public markets. Datadog, for example, went public almost exactly a year ago (an interesting IPO in many ways, see my blog post here).