Vast Data Raises $100 Million in Series C at $1.2 Billion Valuation
To democratize flash for all data
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on April 16, 2020 at 2:26 pmVAST Data, Inc. announced $100 million in series C funding, led by Next47 GmbH, at a valuation of $1.2 billion – 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 83 North, Dell Technologies Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greenfield Partners LLC, Mellanox Capital, Commonfund Capital and Norwest Venture Partners.
The new funding will be used to drive expansion and accelerate 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 HDD,” said Renen Hallak, founder and CEO. “Considering that VAST has not even tapped into its $40M Series B financing, the company now has a $140 million 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 company performance in 2019, where VAST’s first year sales were significantly more than any other storage vendor in IT history.
VAST highlights include:
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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, and Oscar-winning content creators and many other leading hedge funds around the world.
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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.
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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 HDD, including support for Windows and MacOS applications, cloud based replication, military grade encryption.
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Industry Accolades: VAST Data’s Universal Storage has received several 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 and managing partner, 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.”
Comments
VAST Data confirms with this new round its growth illustrated by many successes during the first year of sales.
From our understanding, it didn't touch their past $40 million round raised in February 2019 (see table below) due to rapid sales results. With this new round, $140 million are not touched at all. Most recent $100 million is the highest round by a storage company this year after the $250 million that got last week Cohesity, in a total of only financial 12 rounds since January 2020 compared to 34 in 2019.
Total of $180 million invested in VAST Data includes:
| Date | Series | Amount raised* | Investors |
| 1/2016 | A | 15 | Northwest Venture Partners (NVP), 83North |
| 3/2018 | A | 25 | NVP, 83North, Dell Technologies Capital, Goldman Sachs |
| 2/2019 | B | 40 | NVP, 83North, Dell Technologies Capital |
| 4/2020 | C | 100 | Next47 GmbH, NVP, 83 North, Dell Technologies Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greenfield Partners LLC, Mellanox Capital, Commonfund Capital |
* in $ million
VAST Data also makes history with this round being the fastest storage company to reach $1 billion valuation in less than 18 months, the second is Rubrik, then Nutanix, Cohesity and Pure Storage, all recent players who believe in radical new approaches and designs in their respective segments.
The following table lists investment in file storage with pure players but also unified storage vendors and ISVs active in storage like Red Hat:
| Companies | Year founded | Total raised* | # Rounds |
| Red Hat (public, acq. by IBM) |
1999 | NA | NA |
| Quobyte | 2013 | NA | 3 |
| Rozo | 2010 | 0.75 | 1 |
| DDN | 1998 | 9.9 | 1 |
| Exablox (acq. by StorageCraft) |
2010 | 52.5 | 4 |
| WekaIO | 2014 | 66.7 | 3 |
| Elastifile | 2014 | 74 | 4 |
| Avere | 2008 | 86 | 5 |
| Panzura | 2008 | 90 | 5 |
| Nasuni | 2009 | 147 | 10 |
| Panasas | 2000 | 155.1 | 9 |
| VAST Data | 2016 | 180 | 3 |
| Qumulo | 2012 | 222.3 | 6 |
| BlueArc (acq. by HDS) |
1998 | 224 | 7 |
| Tintri (public, acq. by DDN) |
2008 | 260 | 4 |
| Infinidat | 2001 | 325 | 3 |
| Pure Storage (public) |
2009 | 530.9 | 8 |
| Pillar Data (acq. by Oracle) |
2001 | 544 | NA |
| Cohesity | 2013 | 660 | 5 |
* in $million
We don't mention Stellus Technologies in this table as this is very opaque and we wait more real market facts about it.
As you may have noticed, NVP has also invested in WekaIO, also in file storage, but the surprise comes from the fact that both companies have Dror Nahumi, partner at NVP, as board member.
The company has made a spectacular entrance into the IO500 ranking last November demonstrating that a super fast NAS can participate in this battle. They jumped into the 18th position followed by 2 Qumulo references also validating NFS.
File storage is hot and will be hot again for quite some time. Innovations at various level feed the sector with engineers breaking classic approaches with new ideas and real developments fueled by some hardware innovations as well. It explains a few recent stories and moves, listed in the table above. Google made a strange acquisition with Elastifile, Azure picked a serious player with Avere, IBM absorbed Red Hat in a huge transaction - some products are related to storage like Gluster, Ceph even Sistina in the past -, Exablox got acquired by StorageCraft even if Dell Technologies Capital was an investor like in Elastifile. Does it mean something for Dell having the challenge to find or build the successor of Isilon with current flash, SCM/PM, NVMe, NVMe-over-Fabrics, KV stores and AI in mind. They didn't swallow and finally ignore Elastifile and Exablox probably for good reasons.
The mission of VAST Data is to abolish the multi-tier approach by promoting an all flash tier for all use cases.
The team shakes the file storage segment with design choices:
- The architecture philosophy named DASE (Disaggregated Shared Everything) that decouples the compute layer from the storage layer offering different scalability for each layer,
- Stateless, no cache, no NVRAM... on compute nodes, everything is stored at the storage level connected to all compute nodes via NVMe-oF (RDMA),
- Storage Class Memory (SCM) with Intel Optane today to make (3) writes persistent, accessible from all compute nodes via the fabric,
- NVMe QLC Flash for the final destination of data,
- Data protection with erasure coding with 40+4 and 150+4 meaning 3% overhead with soon 500+8,
- Data reduction with 20:1 ratio,
- An internal transaction (log-structured) file system working as redirect-on-write, this file system is internal i.e not seen from outside,
- NFS v3, NFS over RDMA and S3 access methods with the capability to access the same content via NFS and S3.
There is some sort of parallelism between compute and storage nodes sending same data to 3 storage nodes, all VAST components, but a standard NFS client talking with one NFS head (compute node) still sees the elapsed time to write the entire file via only one server. Working on the internal design from the compute to the storage, the NFS stack on clients, a standard piece, is of course not touched by the company.
We expect the firm to release SMB soon, a replication and a DR feature to see the company consider some data processing on the compute layer, and some PCIe4 NVMe devices coming, so we anticipate also a new performance gain in the near future. CXL will also help later.
The product is named Universal Storage and finally confirmed what was predicted in 2012 with an U3 platform - Universal, Unified and Ubiquitous - 8 years ago on File Storage Technologies blog (in French). In a nutshell, the idea is to multiply use cases, consolidating several unstructured data-based applications towards one single platform making it universal. The second dimension, Unified, is the capability to offer multiple access methods from the same platform and make primary and secondary storage convergent. Last the Ubiquitous term refers to access wherever users and applications reside, today it's essentially covered by S3. So a modern data platform should be able to store, protect, serve and even process data.
In Flash Memory Summit 2019 special report flash, SSD and NVMe software are almost exclusively developed and controlled by Israeli people. This is the case for Toshiba Kumoscale coming from OCZ acquisition in 2013, XIV acquired by IBM in 2008, XtremIO and ScaleIO acquired by EMC in 2012 and 2013 respectively, Annapurna Labs acquired by AWS in 2015 and a few months ago E8 Storage, Plexistor acquired by NetApp in 2017, Kaminario, Reduxio, Lightbits Labs, Excelero, Elastifile, Infinidat, VAST Data, WekaIO, StorONE, Pliops, ScaleMP, even Anobit acquired by Apple in 2012 or Weebit, even and few ones are missing.
2020 will be interesting to watch in file storage with FlashBlade from Pure Storage, Qumulo, WekaIO and VAST Data.
Read also:
Availability of Container Storage Interface by VAST Data
Brings affordable all-flash infrastructure to containerized applications eliminating performance issues related to simplicity, scale, affordability and speed
January 20, 2020 | Press Release
VAST Data Launches Next Gen Universal Storage Architecture
To elevate data and applications to flash
September 12, 2019 | Press Release
VAST Data: Zero Compromise Guarantee To Eliminate Guesswork From Advancing Innovation in Scalable Storage Infrastructure
June 10, 2019 | Press Release
VAST Data Emerges From Stealth Mode With $80 Million in Funding
Revealing file server or NAS with flash at HDD price [with our comments]
March 1, 2019 | Press Release
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