$150 Million Annual Run Rate for Vast Data

VAST Data, Inc. announced record growth in FY21 (ending January 31, 2021), finishing the year with a growth in bookings run rate to over $150 million less than 2 years since launching its Universal Storage platform.

Its balanced growth with an outsized effort from its global team to achieve cash flow positivity within that same time period – laying a solid foundation as the firm builds the next independent data platform company.

“This past year has been one for the record books. We’ve shattered the tradeoffs found in legacy solutions and enabled customers to achieve broad insights from their data across customers and industries that touch all of society,” said Renen Hallak, founder and CEO. “Our Universal Storage platform has broken tradeoffs between performance and capacity, tradeoffs of scale and resilience, tradeoffs of performance and simplicity, and most importantly, it has created a simple and affordable path for our customers to make their valuable data assets ready for the machine learning era.”

Rapid growth and substantial market opportunity are a direct result of organizations furthering their innovation agendas with performance-intensive applications including content, research, AI, ML and advanced analytics. These applications require fast, scalable and consistent access to data in real-time. Universal Storage platform eliminates the complexity of managing data by bringing an end to storage tiering and by allowing companies to scale and access all of their data when they need it at the speed of flash.

Record-Setting Customer Adoption for Universal Storage as Organizations Discard Legacy Infrastructure
As organizations begin to rethink their IT infrastructure needs, The company has seen customer adoption both in terms of the number of its customers as well as single customer investments. Over the past several weeks, it has announced that it now has numerous customers who have made $10 million+ investments in its Universal Storage platform. Customers cut across industries including banking, media, internet, healthcare, manufacturing and government with customers such as Invitae, the US Defense Department, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and several of the leading quantitative trading firms representing a total of $1 trillion of assets under management.

Strengthened Executive Team with Several Appointments – Projected To Grow Employee Headcount More Than 2x Over Next Year
As customers continue to adopt VAST at a blistering pace, the company added more than 80 employees over the past year to support this business momentum, along with several key executives including former NetApp President and Vice Chairman Tom Mendoza, who became the company’s first independent board member.

Additional appointments to the company’s team include:

• Peter Gadd, VP international sales
• David Noy, VP product management
• Daniel Bounds, VP marketing
• Helen Protopapas, VP finance
• Tom Whaley, VP sales
• Rick Franke, VP global customer success, services and support

The company plans to add another 200 positions in 2021.

Spearheads Product Innovation Leading to Numerous Industry Accolades
Alongside strong business growth this year, the company continued to push the envelope on the innovation front including several new product introductions:

• In April 2020, VAST launched Version 3 of Universal Storage, which includes more than 20 new features and introduces new capabilities for enterprise and media customers.
• Announced its certification as a solution provider for Intel Select Solutions for Genomics Analytics, working with Intel to help organizations eliminate the guesswork around building modern analytics infrastructure.
• Launched LightSpeed, its next-gen storage architecture, in September 2020, combining the light-touch of simple NAS appliance experience with performance for NVIDIA GPU-based and AI processor-based computing, taking the guesswork and configuration out of scaling up AI infrastructure.
• In January 2021, Unveiled its new reference architecture based on NVIDIA DGX A100 systems and Universal Storage platform designed to increase storage performance for AI use cases.

As a result of the company’s commitment to innovation, the vendor received several industry recognitions:

• TechTarget: Won gold in the Enterprise Data Storage Products of 2020, for the second consecutive year.
• Gartner: Was recognized as a Cool Vendor in 2020 and was also highlighted in the 2020 Hype Cycle for Storage and Data Protection Technologies report.
• Goldman Sachs: Renen Hallak, founder and CEO, was recognized as one of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs of the year for the second year in a row.
• CRN: Was recognized as an Emerging Vendor in 2020.

“The market opportunity for Universal Storage is massive. The importance of AI and machine learning for organizations across the globe has resulted in the need for organizations to adopt new technologies that modernize their data and enable fast access to vast reserves of data,” said Dror Nahumi, general partner, Norwest Venture Partners.

“Data has continued to be the most strategic asset for businesses and VAST has innovated a system architecture that blends storage technologies such as NVMe over Fabrics, storage class memory and low-cost commodity flash with new efficiency, resilience and access algorithms that make it possible to get the greatest value from these assets,” said Eric Burgener, research VP, infrastructure systems, platforms and technologies, IDC. “Thanks to these advancements, flash storage is now ready for large-capacity scale in today’s data-intensive world.”