Huge datato make an obvious pun, it’s uploading vast sums of money.
The New York-based startup, which provides a scalable, unstructured data storage solution designed to eliminate storage tiering (that is, setups that move data between high- and low-cost storage hardware), announced today that it has secured $118 million in a Series E round led by Fidelity Ventures with participation from New Enterprise Associates, BOND Capital, Drive Capital, Nvidia, Dell, Goldman Sachs, Tiger Global, Commonfund, Norwest, 83North, Greenfield and Next47.
The round values Vast at $9.1 billion post-money and brings the startup’s total raised to $381 million.
“The explosion of interest in artificial intelligence and the need for modern infrastructure that can support these workloads over the last year has been a boon to Vast’s business and positions the company for continued growth and adoption with the enterprise,” co-founder and CEO of Vast, Renen. Hallak told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Given the forward-looking nature of Vast’s offering, data-driven organizations see Vast as a valuable investment in the future of their business.”
Hallak co-founded Vast in 2016 with Jeff Denworth, Shachar Fienblit (who previously held leadership roles at Kaminario and IBM), and Alon Horev (formerly of Cisco and IBM). The way Hallak tells it, the co-founders shared a vision to create a next-generation data management platform—one that leverages commodity hardware to provide faster access to larger datasets for AI workloads.
Vast’s founding team then designed a new storage architecture and software infrastructure layer, which operated in secret until 2019, when the company began selling to customers.
Today, Vast unifies storage, database and compute services on a platform built to power AI- and GPU-accelerated workloads in data centers and clouds. Customers can use Vast to manage unstructured and structured data in their preferred private, public or hybrid clouds — data ranging from video and images to text, streaming and edge device data.
“Connecting legacy enterprise infrastructure is time-consuming and complex, and its inefficiencies make it a costly endeavor,” Hallak said. “The legacy cloud recipe for building AI infrastructure includes disparate technologies that, because of their underlying architecture, do not take full advantage of modern technologies that deliver improved performance, simplified operations, and cost savings… [And] Without the right infrastructure, organizations cannot effectively enable their AI and GPU investments with the access to data required for AI and deep learning.”
While Vast has competition from vendors like Databricks, Hallak claims it has a significant first-mover advantage. There is some truth to this it seems, judging by Vast’s books.
Vast’s annual recurring revenue is now $200 million, and the company, which recently signed a strategic partnership with HPE, is growing 3.3 times year over year, Hallak says. Cash flow has been positive over the past 12 months, while Vast’s customer base has grown to include brands such as Pixar and Zoom.
Now with more than 700 employees worldwide, Vast plans to spend the new installment expanding its business reach with a focus on Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Europe.
“Vast is a software company that operates in commodity hardware, so the pandemic and supply chain issues that have plagued many businesses in recent years have not had a material impact on Vast or its partners and customers,” Hallak said. “While Vast has continued to grow, scale and operate efficiently, this new investment will further advance Vast’s mission to deliver a new class of infrastructure that puts data at the center of how systems think, react and discover ».
