Snowflake Computing announced the opening of a new research and development office in Berlin to accelerate its global technology leadership position. Coming on the heels of its recent $450 million growth funding announcement (which raised Snowflake's pre-money valuation to $3.5 billion), the company chose Berlin as its first European Research and Development Office to help support the exponential growth of demand for its cloud-built data-warehouse-as-a-service.

Snowflake co-founder and CTO, Benoit Dageville will lead the Berlin office. Veteran Snowflake engineers Martin Hentschel and Max Heimel will join Dageville. They will focus on the democratization of machine learning and artificial intelligence, making these technologies more cost-effective and easier to use for enterprises, mid-small companies and individual developers.