It’s been “quite an interesting and lengthy journey” for Snowplow Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Alex Dean, who met his co-founder Yali Sassoon nearly 20 years ago and with whom he’s “been working together ever since.” In 2007, Dean and Sassoon, surveying the open source ad tech landscape, “spotted a gap in the market,” the rest is history. Actually, that’s not true: Their partnership is very much in the present. It’s a company of now.
In May 2025, the company unveiled Snowplow Signals, which “provides applications with access to deep, real-time, trustworthy customer context — making it easier to hyper-personalize user journeys and equip AI agents to overcome the ‘cold start problem’ and drive more relevant interactions.” In layman’s terms, it allows AI to instantaneously create bespoke responses, rather than generic ones.
That’s fitting, because there’s nothing generic about the work Snowplow is doing, which is very much of its time and place even in its teenage years. For the University of Cambridge graduate, Dean’s work with Snowplow has taken up more than half of his professional life, and like the company’s namesake machine, its growth has compounded its outputs over time. Its coffers have filled, too, as the company has raised more than $55 million, most recently earning a $40 million Series B raise in 2022.
All of that money goes toward creating “happy paths” and “failure paths” for data and a “railway-oriented design” that will quarantine failed validations until the problems can be identified and solved, Dean said in a 2022 interview. These “data contracts” are at the core of Snowplow’s business; Dean calls them a combination of “everything in tech, people, process and technology” and says they’re at the philosophical core of the company.
At that core is pure joy in the work, one that has driven Dean and Sassoon from the beginning. “It’s been really fun,” he said, bringing “data product accelerators together, getting more sleeves up with partners and testing it” – and repeating, over and over, for nearly 20 years.