T hierry Cruanes is a French technology entrepreneur who is a co-founder of the cloud data warehousing giant, Snowflake. A software engineer with a Ph.D. in computer science, he was one of the three co-founders of the company in 2012, along with his two colleagues, Benoit Dageville and Prasanna Sankar. The trio, who had all worked at Oracle, founded Snowflake with the vision of building a modern data warehouse from the ground up for the cloud.

As one of the key technical founders, Cruanes was instrumental in developing the innovative architecture that has been the key to Snowflake's massive success. He has served as the company's chief technology officer, guiding its technical vision and strategy. Snowflake's 2020 IPO was one of the largest software IPOs in history, and the soaring value of the company's stock turned the three founders into billionaires. He is a major figure in the world of database and cloud computing technology.