Vast Data grows war chest with $100 million funding Round, $1.2 billion valuation

Vast Data nearly tripled its valuation to $1.2 billion in a $100 million Series C funding round announced today, bringing its total funding to  $180 million.

The financing follows what Vast Data calls “unprecedented performance” in 2019 — the startup’s first year shipping its product — during which it claims its sales were “significantly more than any other storage vendor in IT history.” The company says its average selling price tops $1 million, but it doesn’t provide any total revenue numbers for 2019.

“While this valuation is a reflection of our disruptive force in the market and our early business performance, our path to building the next great storage success story is much different than other unicorn infrastructure companies that have come before us,” said Vast Data co-founder and VP of products and marketing Jeff Denworth in a blog post announcing the new funding round.

The latest storage unicorn, however, identifies as more of a camel in that it doesn’t “adhere to the classic ‘spend, spend, spend’ business models that other venture-backed infrastructure companies exhibit,” Denworth wrote. Instead the company is focusing its efforts on building a long-term sustainable business, he said, and it has been successful so far in that it has yet to dip into the $40 million Series B financing from last year.

“Combined with this new round, Vast now has a $140 million war chest that we will spend like camels, not like unicorns,” Denworth wrote.

The New York-based company said the new financing will allow it to invest in its business and continue the forward momentum to “innovate and capture market share across boom times as well as times of market turbulence.”

Vast Data now is backed by Norwest Venture Partners, TPG Growth, Dell Technologies Capital, 83 North, Goldman Sachs, and newcomers Next47, Commonfund Capital, and Mellanox Capital.

Universal Storage

The company made a big splash when it emerged from stealth mode in February 2019 with its all-flash Universal Storage architecture and $80 million in funding. Vast Data’s Universal Storage System uses NVMe-oF (non-volatile memory express over fabrics), storage class memory and quad level cell (QLC) flash, innovations that the company says were not available until 2018.

Universal Storage hardware uses Intel Optane persistent memory chips and consumer-grade QLC NAND for fast access without tiered storage. The result is a disaggregated data-shared everywhere platform.

The key benefits, Vast Data claims, are flash performance at hard-disk cost, massive scalability, new analytic insights, and petabyte storage capability in a single rack. The platform carries a 10-year “endurance” warranty. It also comes with guarantees on uptime and data loss, fixed price maintenance for a decade, and free access to future updates.

The startup’s customers include the U.S. National Institutes of Health to Consumers, some of the world’s leading hedge funds such as Squarepoint, major corporations, and governments, Denworth said in an interview with SDxCentral.

File Fighters

Software-defined storage and data management is an active field, and VAST is gaining a healthy piece of that market share in the US, according to data storage research firm Coldago’s customer survey earlier this year.

The firm surveyed end users from 1,123 U.S. companies and 560 European companies in the U.K., Germany, and France to determine the top supplier for block and file storage. Half the users worked at enterprises and half worked at small to medium businesses.

US respondents’ file supplier rankings showed NetApp, Qumulo, and Dell EMC as market share leaders. They were followed by Pure Storage, DDN, and newcomer Vast Data, which narrowly placed ahead of Hitachi Vantara, IBM, and Huawei.

Marching On

Despite the global pandemic, which continues to flatline the pulse of economies, Vast Data says in the coming weeks it will release Universal Storage 3.0.

Denworth said the update will offer enterprise customers a range of capabilities as they look to push beyond the hard drive including support for Windows and MacOS applications, cloud-based replication, and military-grade encryption.“Version 3.0 of our solution, and future versions of the platform, will enable us to move beyond just a storage company and become a next-generation infrastructure company, greatly expanding our TAM.”

―SDX Central