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Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW) received an Overweight rating by KeyBanc as the firm initiated coverage on the data cloud platform vendor.
"We are positive on durable plus-20% growth driven by continued legacy data warehouse migrations, improving public cloud migration trends, a significantly expanding product portfolio, and the use of Snowflake’s easy-to-use, governed platform for developing and hosting GenAI workloads," said KeyBanc's Eric Heath in a note.
The investment bank also set a price target of $185 on the Bozeman, Mont.-based company.
Snowflake ticked up about 1.5% during early trading Thursday.
KeyBanc was also high on Snowflake's experienced management team. For example, the new CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy, was the former leader of Google's (GOOG)(GOOGL) advertising business, and he brings AI leadership to the table.
Seeking Alpha contributor and analyst Matteo Sada agrees that Ramaswamy brings AI experience to Snowflake.
"Ramaswamy's journey is unique - a machine learning engineer at Google turned venture capitalist, he co-founded Neeva, a search engine powered by AI technologies including large language models and generative AI," Sada said.
Snowflake acquired Neeva in 2023, and brought over Ramaswamy, who recently bought $5M worth of Snowflake shares to show his faith in the company.
Snowflake has a Buy rating from both Seeking Alpha and Wall Street analysts. However, it has a Hold rating from Seeking Alpha's quant system, which routinely beats the market.