It was 2012, and Alex Dean, along with Co-Founder Yali Sassoon, was deep in the weeds of a consulting practice, helping clients like the V&A Museum and Jack Wills make sense of customer data. “Our clients wanted access to more digital, online data,” Dean recalled. “Referred to at the time as ‘clickstream’ data, essentially web analytics.” Every time they turned to the tools available, like Google Analytics and Omniture, they hit the same wall. The data was there, but the questions you could ask of it were pre-decided.
So they built their own way out. The first version of what would become Snowplow Analytics took a day to put together. “It was really hacky,” Sassoon remembered. They spent the next day writing about it online, hoping someone might find it useful. Most of it was ignored initially.
Before Snowplow, Dean, a Cambridge history graduate, worked in strategic consulting at Fathom Partners and later in program management at OpenX, where he and Sassoon first gained experience building data infrastructure. In 2008, they founded Keplar LLP, where they encountered the problem Snowplow would eventually solve.
From the start, Snowplow was built on the belief that data should belong to those who generate it. “A lot of people were building SaaS products at the time, but we didn’t want to do that,” Dean said. “We made it open source to open it up for others.” The early adopters were scrappy, resourceful data engineers Dean affectionately dubbed “data MacGyvers”: one-person teams stitching together pipelines and hungry for tools that didn’t dictate their schema. “We still champion the data MacGyvers,” he said later. “It’s just the MacGyvers have grown up.”
By 2020, Snowplow’s JavaScript Tracker was the third-most adopted web tracker in the world. Today, the platform processes over a trillion events per month, serving companies such as Strava, HelloFresh, and Burberry. Dean, who became CEO in 2018, has spent recent years focused on collecting behavioral data and making it actionable in real time.
In May 2025, the company launched Snowplow Signals, a real-time customer intelligence system designed to help product and engineering teams build AI-powered experiences. The platform combines live in-session data with historical context, enabling applications to anticipate user behavior rather than just respond to it. Dean has described it as moving from reactive to truly intelligent experiences.
It’s a long way from a rough first build and a blog post few people read. Yet Snowplow’s ambition has stayed the same: to use data not only to explain what happened, but to influence what happens next.