As investors fret over whether high-flying technology stocks have gotten too frothy, the recent volatility isn’t scaring away Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. — at least not when it comes to getting in on the ground floor of what may be one of the year’s most sought-after tech IPOs. Yes, you read that correctly.
Snowflake Inc., a fast-growing cloud-software and data-warehousing company, filed an amended offering prospectus Tuesday that revealed Berkshire will buy roughly $250 million of Snowflake shares at its IPO price and an additional 4 million shares from another stockholder. The two transactions add up to a roughly $600 million overall stake in the company if it goes public at the assumed price of $80 per share, the midpoint of the $75 to $85 current range. Snowflake said it plans to raise more than $2 billion by selling 28 million shares in the public offering.
