Vast Data lands $118M to grow its data storage platform for AI workloads

The New York-based startup, which provides a scale-out, unstructured data storage solution designed to eliminate tiered storage (i.e. setups that move data between high- and low-cost storage hardware), today announced that it 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 AI and the need for modern infrastructure that can support these workloads in the last year has been a boon for Vast’s business and positions the company for continued growth and adoption with the enterprise,” Vast co-founder and CEO Renen Hallak told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Given the future-proof 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 of creating a next-gen data management platform — one that leveraged commodity hardware to deliver faster access to bigger datasets for AI workloads.

Vast’s founding team subsequently designed a new storage architecture and software infrastructure layer, operating in stealth until 2019, when the company began selling to customers.

Today, Vast unifies storage, database and compute engine services in a platform built to power AI and GPU-accelerated workloads across datacenters 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 device data.