NEW YORK – April 16, 2020 – VAST Data, a storage company breaking decades-old tradeoffs, today announced $100 million in Series C funding, led by Next47, at a valuation of $1.2B – a near-tripling since the company’s launch in February 2019. The round brings the company’s total funding to $180 million and includes strong participation from past 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.
Building from the ground up on game changing technologies, VAST Data has developed the world’s first all flash storage platform that revolutionizes the economics of flash storage to make flash infrastructure affordable for all classes of data, thereby rendering the hard drive and storage tiering obsolete. The power of VAST’s platform is applied across a number of industries, and is instrumental to organizations tackling the worldwide spread of COVID-19. This includes powering next generation life science advancements and helping financial services organizations stabilize the economy.
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,” said Renen Hallak, Founder & CEO of VAST Data. “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.
Shattering Performance Benchmarks
This latest funding follows unprecedented company performance in 2019, where VAST’s first year sales were significantly more than any other storage vendor in IT history. VAST highlights include:
Worldwide Customer Adoption: Across four continents, dozens of customers have now selected VAST technology to redefine how they extract value from vast reserves of data – with each spending over a million dollars (on average) to modernize their infrastructure. 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, Fortune 500 companies, Oscar-winning content creators and many other leading hedge funds around the world.
Worldwide Employee Growth: Since the beginning of 2019, VAST has grown the size of its global team by 130%. In addition, the company is planning to fill over 100 positions as it prepares for the next wave of customer adoption. More information on currently open positions can be found at vastdata.com/careers.
Industry Leading Product Innovation: The pace of enhancement of VAST Data’s Universal Storage is only increasing, with four major feature releases since product launch. In a few weeks, VAST will continue its push into the market with the release of Universal Storage 3.0, which will introduce a wealth of 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 and much more.
Industry Accolades: VAST Data’s Universal Storage has received several leading industry accolades, including being recognized by Storage Magazine and SearchStorage as the 2019 Storage Product of the Year, as one of CRN’s 10 Hottest Data Storage Startups of 2019 and as a Channel Partners 2020 Channel Influencer.
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,” said Lak Ananth, CEO & Managing Partner at Next47. “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.
Customer and Partner Quotes
“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,” said Jose Arrieta, CIO of Health and Human Services. “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.”
“At Squarepoint, we have deep expertise in trading, technology and operations and attribute our success to rigorous scientific research,” said Olivier Delahaye, Chief Technology Officer of Squarepoint. “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.”
“AI infrastructure is moving out of the shadows and being operationalized across IT organizations,” said Manuvir Das, Head of Enterprise Computing at NVIDIA. “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.”
For more information on VAST Data, including soon-to-be-announced Universal Storage architecture enhancements, please visit VASTData.com.