Extensive datato make the pun clear, is raising wide Cash amounts.
The New York-based startup, which provides a large-scale, unstructured data storage solution designed to eliminate tiered storage (i.e., setups that move data between high- and low-cost storage devices), today announced 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, bringing the startup’s total valuation to $381 million.
“The increased interest in AI and the need for modern infrastructure that can support these workloads in the past year has been a boon for Vast’s business and positioned the company for continued growth and adoption with the enterprise,” Vast co-founder and CEO Renen Al-Hallaq told TechCrunch in an email interview. Email. “Given the future-proof nature of Vast’s offerings, 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 Feinblit (who previously held leadership roles at Kaminario and IBM), and Alon Horev (formerly at Cisco and IBM). The way Hallaq tells it, the founders shared a vision to create a next-generation data management platform — one that leverages commodity hardware to provide faster access to larger data sets for AI workloads.
Vast’s founding team then designed a new storage architecture and software infrastructure layer, which operated anonymously until 2019, when the company began selling to customers.
Today, Vast unifies storage, database, and compute engines into a platform designed to run AI and GPU-accelerated workloads across data centers and clouds. Customers can use Vast to manage unstructured and structured data across their preferred private, public or hybrid clouds – data ranging from videos and images to text, data streams and edge data.
“Putting together legacy enterprise infrastructure is time-consuming and complex, and its inefficiency makes it a costly endeavor,” Hallaq said. “The legacy cloud recipe for building AI infrastructure includes disparate technologies, which, due to their underlying architecture, do not take full advantage of modern technologies that provide improved performance, simplified operations, and cost savings… [And] Without the right infrastructure, organizations will not be able to effectively enable their AI and GPU-enabled investments with access to the data needed for AI and deep learning.
While Vast has competition with vendors like Databricks, Hallaq asserts that it has a significant leadership advantage. There seems to be some truth, judging by Fast’s books.
Vast’s annual recurring revenue is now $200 million, and the company, which recently signed a strategic partnership with HPE, is growing 3.3x annually, Hallaq 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 direct the new segment towards expanding its business with a focus on the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Europe regions.
“Vast is a software company that runs on commodity hardware, so the pandemic and supply chain issues that have plagued many companies in the past few years have not had a material impact on Vast or its partners and customers,” Hallaq said. “As Vast continues to grow, expand, and operate efficiently, this new investment will further advance Vast’s mission of delivering a new class of infrastructure that puts data at the heart of how systems think, interact and discover.”