AI infrastructure major VAST Data’s valuation rises to over $9 billion after new financing

VAST Data, the technology company creating an infrastructure layer for the AI ​​era, today announced that it has raised $118 million in a Series E funding round. The round was led by Fidelity Management & Research Company.

The investment, which also included participation from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), BOND Capital and Drive Capital, has increased the seven-year-old company’s valuation almost three-fold to $9.1 billion, following a Series D valuation of 3.7 billion dollars in 2021. .

VAST Data plans to use the capital to accelerate its work and deliver a new category of infrastructure that puts data at the center of how systems think, react and discover. This, she says, will enable organizations to address their most pressing data challenges and enable unprecedented advances in technology, economics, social dynamics and scientific research.

a report of Information It also suggests that some of the proceeds from the round will go towards a planned share buyback by existing shareholders.

VAST Data and its unified data platform

Founded in 2016 with the mission of making data storage easier for enterprises, VAST Data has evolved into a unified data platform, where containerized storage, database, and compute engine services are combined into a single scalable software stack designed from the ground up.

The platform offers simplified data processing and management experience and support from partners such as Nvidia and CoreWeave. It allows you to easily and quickly capture, synthesize, and learn from large amounts of data, paving the way for next-generation AI-driven applications.

This includes AI-assisted discovery, where machines recreate the discovery process to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges (such as life-saving treatments) and achieve in a matter of days a level of specialization that used to take decades.

“What we have is a continuous computing engine that combines VAST DataStore, which is the (existing) file and object layer, with the next generation database that we have invented and the DataEngine, which is the function execution environment created with events. currents and triggers. All of this happens from the edge to the cloud through what we call VAST DataSpace,” said Jeff Denworth, co-founder of VAST Data, in a pre-media press conference when he announced the unified platform a few months ago.

The exabyte-scale DataStore acts as a storage architecture that captures and serves massive batches of unstructured natural data while eliminating storage tiers. Once data is captured, VAST DataBase’s natively integrated semantic database layer applies structure to the information and enables fast queries at scale. It combines the features of a database, data warehouse, and data lake into a database management system that resolves the trade-offs between capturing and cataloging real-time natural data as well as real-time analytics.

Finally, the platform offers intelligence to transform the collected data into an understanding of its underlying characteristics. This is done through VAST DataEngine, the global function execution engine that consolidates data centers and cloud regions into a global computing framework. It supports programming languages ​​such as SQL and Python, a materialized and reproducible model training and event notification system that makes it easy to manage AI pipelines.

Meaningful adoption

While VAST Data already had a huge footprint with a strong global customer and employee base, the launch of the unified AI-focused platform has further strengthened the company’s position. The offering is used by several major companies, including Zoom, Allen Institute, and Pixar Animation Studios.

In the financial quarter ending in September, when VAST Data announced the unified data platform, its cumulative software bookings exceeded $1 billion. The company also said it achieved more than three times year-on-year growth and maintained positive cash flow for the last 12 quarters with a gross margin of almost 90%.

With this funding, VAST Data plans to double its platform, creating a foundation for AI advancements of the future. However, it remains to be seen exactly how the company will expand and improve the platform to achieve this mission and attract the attention of the enormous number of AI companies that are emerging in different sectors. Questions submitted by VentureBeat remained unanswered as of this writing.

“To have a true impact in this era of AI and deep learning, you need not only to have a large amount of data, but also to have high-quality data that is properly organized and available in the right place at the right time. The VAST Data Platform delivers an AI infrastructure that opens the door to automated discovery that can solve some of humanity’s most complex challenges,” said Renen Hallak, CEO and co-founder of VAST Data, in a press release.

According to statistics from IDC’s global AI spending guide, global spending on AI-centric systems is growing at double-digit rates and will exceed $308 billion by 2026.