VAST Data: $100 Million Funding And $1.2 Billion Valuation

By Noah Long ● Apr 17, 2020
  • Storage company VAST Data announced it raised $100 million in Series C funding led by Next47 at a valuation of $1.2 billion

Storage company VAST Data announced it raised $100 million in Series C funding led by Next47 at a valuation of $1.2 billion. This is nearly triple the valuation since the company launched in February 2019.

This round of funding brings the company’s total to $180 million in funding. And it includes strong participation from previous investors as well as new investors, including 83North, Commonfund Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greenfield Partners, Mellanox Capital, and Norwest Venture Partners. The new funding will be used to drive global expansion and accelerate the company’s next phase of growth.

The company is building from the ground up on game-changing technologies. For example, VAST Data has developed the world’s first all-flash storage platform that revolutionizes the economics of flash storage by making flash infrastructure affordable for all classes of data thus rendering the hard drive and storage tiering obsolete. And the power of VAST’s platform is applied across a number of industries, including next-generation life science advancements and helping financial services organizations stabilize the economy.

This funding round follows unprecedented company performance in 2019 where VAST’s first year sales were significantly more than any other storage vendor in IT history. 

There are dozens of customers across 4 continents that have selected VAST technology to extract value from vast reserves of data with each spending over a million dollars (on average) to modernize their infrastructure. And customers include the US National Institutes of Health (an agency operated by the US Department of Health and Human Services), Squarepoint, Krystal Hosting, Ginkgo BioWorks, DownUnder GeoSolutions, Harvard Medical School, Zebra Medical, a number of Fortune 500 companies, Oscar-winning content creators and, many leading hedge funds around the world.

In the next few weeks, VAST will continue its push into the market with the release of Universal Storage 3.0. This feature will introduce capabilities for mission critical enterprise customers who are eager to evolve beyond the hard drive, including support for Windows and MacOS applications, cloud based replication, encryption, etc.

Key Quotes:

“We started VAST Data with a single mission, to simplify the data center and to enable insights that were never before possible. In 2019, VAST’s early customer adoption and financial performance surpassed all historic benchmarks – validating that the technology and product-market fit were right for customers who are struggling under tiered storage architectures and the limitations of the hard drive. Considering that VAST has not even tapped into its $40M Series B financing, the company now has a $140M war chest to satisfy global customer demand for next-gen infrastructure, and to enable data driven applications through continued innovation.”

-Renen Hallak, Founder & CEO of VAST Data

The world’s most valuable resource is now data, and VAST Data’s highly-disruptive infrastructure concept unlocks access to massive reserves of information – eliminating the complexity and compromises that have resulted from the long-standing performance and capacity tradeoff. In a little over a year, VAST has delivered some truly record-breaking business results and we’re thrilled to partner with them to further scale the business.” 

-Lak Ananth, CEO & Managing Partner at Next47

As an early adopter of advanced storage systems, we’ve deployed scalable storage architectures to help HHS agencies to pioneer new scientific discoveries and improve public health. As our component Operating Divisions move beyond the hard drive era, software-enabled storage architectures helps us modernize our scientific agenda and enable AI-driven research with the power of flash.”

-Jose Arrieta, CIO of Health and Human Services

“At Squarepoint, we have deep expertise in trading, technology and operations and attribute our success to rigorous scientific research. We invest in many cutting-edge technologies, which includes VAST Data’s Universal Storage platform, to support our most intensive computing efforts, for hundreds of researchers on a global scale.”

-Olivier Delahaye, Chief Technology Officer of Squarepoint

“AI infrastructure is moving out of the shadows and being operationalized across IT organizations. Enterprises can take advantage of the deep learning performance of NVIDIA DGX AI systems and VAST Data’s Universal Storage all-flash concept to simplify, scale and accelerate their AI adoption.”

-Manuvir Das, Head of Enterprise Computing at NVIDIA