VAST Data announced last Thursday, April 16, 2020, its newly acquired Series C funding amounting to $100 million. Following the investment, the storage company is now valued at a whopping $1.2 billion, finally achieving unicorn status. The total company funding now clocks in at $180 million.
Led by Next47, the investment arm of Siemens, the Series C funding round included the participation of existing company investors such as 83North, Commonfund Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greenfield Partners, Mellanox Capital, and Norwest Venture Partners.
Based on its press release, VAST Data intends to use its funding towards expanding its business globally and boosting the company’s overall growth with its next phase.
Founded in 2016, VAST Data has drastically changed the game of flash storage data with its cost-effective and more resilient systems. According to Tech Crunch, the firm currently leverages technological advancements and systems such as Intel 3D Xpoint, as well as NVMe over Fabrics and QLC flash.
In an interview with Tech Crunch, chief executive officer Renen Hallak said, “This new architecture, coupled with a lot of algorithmic work in software and types of metadata structures that we’ve developed on top of it, allows us to break those trade-offs and allows us to make much more efficient use of media, and also allows us to move beyond scalability limits, resiliency limits and problems that other systems have in terms of usability and maintainability.”
In terms of the company’s success, Hallak said that looking around the industry’s current hardware and seeing what was currently in research and development at the time – care of Intel and Mellanox – allowed them to build storage and software technologies at their earliest convenience, reports Forbes.
Today, VAST Data currently has contracts and partnerships with big industry names. Among its impressive list of clientele are General Dynamics, Gingko Bioworks, Harvard Medical School, National Institutes of Health, Square Point, and Zebra Medical Vision.
All of the aforementioned companies with contracts reportedly leverage VAST Data’s services for its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities as well as its machine learning workloads, notes Venture Beat. Technologies by the storage firm are also utilized for life sciences and research.
As of writing, Forbes states that VAST Data’s storage systems are being used to find a cure and to treat the ongoing pandemic. With storage being a frontline need in a time where mass testing and research is called for, CEO Hallak finds that their business is booming.
In working with numerous companies to fight the pandemic, Hallak said to Forbes, “In some cases we just send them these systems and worry about them paying us after this is all over.”
Despite ‘worries’ over-payments, the firm has yet to tap into its multimillion funding, including the $40 million raised in February 2019’s Series A investment round.
