Snowflake, the cloud data company, has acquired Natoma, a startup that controls how AI agents connect to and act inside corporate software. Snowflake announced a definitive agreement on 27 May 2026, and chief executive Sridhar Ramaswamy discussed the deal on the company's earnings call for the first quarter of fiscal 2027, The Register reported.
The announcement did not include a price. Snowflake's quarterly report on Form 10-Q, filed two days later, said it had signed the agreement on 24 May for total stated consideration of about $110 million, mostly in Snowflake common stock with the rest in cash. The deal closed on 3 June 2026. Snowflake's next quarterly report valued the consideration at $128.3 million on that date: about 0.5 million shares worth $110.5 million plus $17.7 million in cash.
Snowflake plans to build Natoma's technology into Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex Agents and its Cortex Code coding agent. It also issued about 0.2 million shares, worth $54.4 million, to some Natoma employees, vesting over three years as long as they stay with the company.
What Natoma built
Natoma makes a gateway that sits in front of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, the connectors that let AI agents use outside tools. The Register reported that the gateway checks identity, access policy and audit rules on each individual tool call, recording who asked for an action, what permissions they hold and whether it should proceed.
According to Snowflake, the platform includes a verified library of MCP servers and was already deployed at some of the world's largest enterprises. Mayank Upadhyay, Snowflake's chief security and trust officer, told GovInfoSecurity that Natoma comes with about 100 MCP servers out of the box and that the problem it solves is mainly one of identity and authorization.
Snowflake presented the deal as a response to risk. It cited its own research finding that 96% of organizations still face significant problems scaling AI, and said the spread of MCP had raised concerns about fragmented governance, unsanctioned "shadow AI" and data leaking out as agents link up across company systems.
“AI agents will only become enterprise-ready if organizations can govern how they operate across systems, applications and tools. Together with Snowflake, we’re building the governance and connectivity layer that enables enterprises to securely operationalize AI at scale.”
Why Snowflake is buying
Snowflake said owning Natoma would let it extend the governance it applies to data to the actions AI agents take. Customers would be able to connect Snowflake's agents to software-as-a-service applications, cloud environments, private clouds and on-premises systems, and combine Snowflake data with context from tools such as Slack, email, CRM systems and Jira.
Ramaswamy described Natoma as central to what he called an "agentic control plane", according to The Register. In the announcement he said that intelligence without governance creates risk and that agents need the right context, permissions and policy limits to work safely inside a company.
Analysts quoted by CIO saw the logic but stressed execution. Michael Ni of Constellation Research said the deal reflected Snowflake's effort to own the control plane for AI. Robert Kramer of KramerERP warned that MCP is a protocol rather than a governance model in itself, and Phil Fersht of HFS Research said most enterprises were not ready to adopt MCP at scale.
The founders and the funding
Natoma was founded in 2024 by Pratyus Patnaik, Will Potter, Zachary Hart and Paresh Bhaya, The Register reported. Patnaik, the chief executive, had earlier built atSpoke, a workplace operations platform he sold to Okta in August 2021 for $79.3 million, and then spent more than two years as a senior director at Okta, according to GovInfoSecurity.
GovInfoSecurity reported that the San Francisco company had 27 employees and had raised a $7 million seed round in May 2025 from Index Ventures and Greylock. The Register put the team at about 20 people.
Snowflake's run of acquisitions
Natoma was the sixth acquisition Snowflake had announced since June 2025, The Register reported. The others were PostgreSQL provider Crunchy Data in June 2025, reported at about $250 million; database migration company Datometry and data discovery startup Select Star in November 2025; observability platform Observe in January 2026, for about $1 billion; and AI data pipeline planner TensorStax in February 2026. The Natoma announcement came on the same day Snowflake signed a five-year, $6 billion agreement with AWS.
Snowflake said it bought Natoma mainly for its technology and staff. Its 10-Q for the quarter to July 2026 said revenue from Natoma since the acquisition was not material and that Natoma's operations had already been integrated into Snowflake's own.
