Flash Storage Vendor Vast Data Raises $100M in Series C Funding Round

Flash storage vendor Vast Data has unveiled a $100 million Series C funding round to continue to grow its business.

With the funding, the company has now brought in a total of $180 million, resulting in a $1.2 billion valuation. Leading the Series C funding round is global venture firm Next47. Other investors include 83 North, Dell Technologies Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greenfield Partners, Mellanox Capital, Commonfund Capital and Norwest Venture Partners.

Vast Data came out of stealth mode in February 2019 with its universal storage concepts and products. It is built on an exabyte-scale, all NVMe flash architecture for customer data storage. Vast Data uses a disaggregated shared-everything (DASE) architecture and global algorithms to provide high storage efficiency and resilience for customers.

The $100 million in the Series C funding round is for driving global expansion and business growth.

Vast Data’s Renen Hallak

“Following a historic first-year revenue performance in 2019, we’ve had the fortune of receiving interest from new investors such as Next47, Commonfund Capital and Mellanox Capital who have joined our existing investor team,” Renen Hallak, the company’s founder and CEO, told Channel Futures. “While the product is universal storage, what we’ve been selling is outcomes. The move to Vast has resulted in a radical simplification and acceleration at the application level once customers liberate themselves from the last 20 years of storage complexity.”

Next47’s Lak Ananth

Lak Ananth, CEO and managing partner of Next47, said the investment was made because data is a critical business resource. “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 trade-off,” he said. “We’re thrilled to partner with them to further scale the business.”

In September 2019, Vast Data added accelerated support for AI applications and asymmetric cluster expansion to its services. The Vast Data Universal Storage Platform received more tools to improve the performance and resiliency of business data storage systems.

Eric Kaplan, CTO for Ahead, a Chicago-based Vast reseller, called the Series C funding round a positive sign for partners.

Ahead’s Eric Kaplan

“It gives them more runway to focus on building the right product without pressure,” said Kaplan. “Vast has an incredible price/performance/density proposition that clients are finding extremely valuable across data intensive workloads.”

The Vast sales and engineering teams are great to work with, he added. “These are industry veterans who know the problems our clients are looking to solve and have deep expertise in the storage industry. The product works incredibly well, and we’ve had it in some of the toughest and most demanding client environments.”

Architecting IT’s Chris M. Evans

Chris M. Evans, an analyst/consultant with Architecting IT, said getting this investment in today’s COVID-19 coronavirus environment is meaningful.

“I’m sure investors are reviewing their portfolios to determine which businesses survive and which are left to wither on the vine,” said Evans. “I genuinely don’t see investment firms being sentimental and keeping investments alive without good cause.”

Vast is targeting enterprises, financials and other organizations that can weather the storm, he said. “The technology is strong, and not going down the excessive marketing route that other unicorn startups have followed is definitely a wise move.”

Vast’s technology is something customers will buy into for the long term, said Evans. “By the nature of the platform, solutions will be built for the retention and active analysis of data over many years,” he said. “Many of the challenges we’re experiencing at the moment have solutions based on data analysis that fit right onto the Vast platform.”

For channel partners, Evans said he sees lots of promise with the new investment in the company. “The channel has a great opportunity to help their customer develop innovative solutions that leverage off the benefit of having all their data in one place.,” he said. “The success of Vast as a company is going to be dependent on the ability to demonstrate practical and financially rewarding use cases for deploying a single unified storage platform. Vast needs the channel to make this work and can’t be successful without that ecosystem.”