Today, Snowflake announced its investment in Metaplane, a Boston-based startup that helps enterprises tackle data quality issues through an AI-powered platform.
Although the investment amount is undisclosed, Snowflake stated that this partnership will enhance the integration between Metaplane's data observability tools and the Snowflake Data Cloud. This integration will allow Snowflake users to more effectively monitor the information driving their downstream projects, including AI applications.
Metaplane is entering a competitive space, challenging well-funded players like Monte Carlo and Acceldata. Snowflake has confirmed that Metaplane will also launch a native app for its platform. This marks Snowflake’s fifth investment of the year and its second in the observability sector; earlier in March, it supported Observe, a tool that analyzes telemetry from enterprise applications to provide relevant insights for quick incident resolution.
How Metaplane Supports Snowflake Customers
Data is critical for modern business applications, including RAG-based AI chatbots. However, many organizations struggle to maintain data quality due to the overwhelming amount of information spread across siloed systems, databases, and applications. Managing complex data pipelines often leaves teams grappling with hundreds or thousands of data sources.
Founded by MIT graduate Kevin Hu, former HubSpot engineer Peter Casinelli, and ex-Appcues developer Guru Mahendran, Metaplane addresses these challenges by leveraging AI throughout the data stack, from ingestion to consumption.
The platform integrates with tools such as Fivetran, Snowflake, BigQuery, dbt, Airflow, and Tableau. Utilizing a machine learning model, it trains on the entire data profile—including historical metadata, lineage, and logs. Once set up, it automatically flags data anomalies, including schema changes, based on user-defined monitors.
Hu previously indicated that setting up these monitors takes just 15 minutes, allowing teams to track data quality metrics like freshness, row count, uniqueness, and null values. Alerts are sent directly to the relevant data teams via their preferred communication channels.
With Snowflake's investment, Metaplane will enhance its integration with the Snowflake Data Cloud, expanding its capabilities to include comprehensive telemetry and metadata. This integration will cover entire data pipelines and will interface with app features such as Snowpark, Snowpark Container Services, Snowflake Native Apps, and Streamlit.
Ultimately, this collaboration will enable Snowflake customers to closely monitor the quality of their data assets throughout the pipeline, informing them of any issues along with potential root causes and solutions.
While the timeline for this integration is still to be determined, Snowflake confirms that Metaplane will launch a native app within the Data Cloud. This will facilitate users in deploying and managing Metaplane directly within their Snowflake instance, eliminating the need to connect Snowflake separately as is required with other tools.
“This development opens the door to richer experiences and allows customers to leverage Metaplane fully without moving or copying their data outside the secure environment of their Snowflake account,” stated Ashwin Kamath and Harsha Kapre from Snowflake’s product management team.
Snowflake’s Focus on AI
Under CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy's leadership, Snowflake has aggressively embraced AI to better compete with Databricks, a company well-established in AI since its inception. Last year, during its Snowday event, Snowflake launched Cortex, a fully managed service for building generative AI applications using data stored in the Snowflake Data Cloud.
In subsequent months, the company partnered with several open-source AI vendors, including Mistral and Reka, to offer their models on Cortex, enabling teams to develop applications for a variety of use cases. Snowflake also trained Arctic, its in-house large language model optimized for complex enterprise tasks like SQL and code generation, and introduced a copilot experience to facilitate data exploration.
Prior to the Metaplane investment, Snowflake had already backed four other companies—Coda, Coalesce, Observe, and Landing AI—to enhance its data and AI initiatives.
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