Vast Data raises $1B at $30B valuation as AI infrastructure demand accelerates

Vast Data Inc. today said it has raised about $1 billion in a late-stage Series F funding round that values the company at $30 billion amid growing demand for infrastructure to support artificial intelligence workloads.

Founder and Chief Executive Renen Hallak (pictured) said the size of the round was driven by investor interest rather than a predefined capital target. “We never go out looking for funding rounds,” he said. “We get inbounds all the time. We ask them, how much do you want to invest? And that’s the number that it added up to.”

Vast said it has more than $4 billion in cumulative bookings and over $500 million in committed annual recurring revenue, along with positive free cash flow and operating profitability. Hallak said the 10-year-old company has been cash-flow positive for several years and does not require external capital to fund operations.

The $30 billion valuation is more than triple the $9.1 billion valuation the company received after raising a $118 million Series E round in late 2023. “It’s been all driven by the AI revolution,” Hallak said. “There’s a new stack getting formed.”

AI has organizations rethinking how data, computing and applications are integrated. Vast positions itself as a provider of a unifying software layer that sits between hardware and AI models.

“We’re the middle layer, the software infrastructure layer in this new stack,” Hallak said.

The company originally built its platform as a storage manager. Since then, it has evolved into what he calls a “disaggregated shared-everything architecture,” designed to address tradeoffs between performance, scalability and cost in distributed systems. The Vast platform now integrates data management, analytics and orchestration.

That progression reflects the market’s larger shift from model training to inference and real-time decision-making, where data access, latency and resilience become more critical. In an interview with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s streaming news service, Hallak said enterprises that are now moving AI projects into production environments require more robust infrastructure.

“They need it to be simple,” he said. “They need it to be secure.”

Vast is also extending its platform to support agent-based AI systems, which require coordination across distributed environments and stricter controls over how data is accessed and shared. “We need a place for agents to share experiences and store memories and communicate with each other in a safe way that’s observable,” he said.

The financing includes both primary and secondary capital, providing liquidity for early investors and employees while bringing in strategic partners that can support planned geographic expansion and ecosystem development. Hallak said the company continues to grow across the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific, with additional expansion planned, particularly in Latin America, India and China.

He said the company’s platform is already deployed in production environments supporting large-scale AI workloads, including systems with thousands of graphics processing units. The company said it is supporting millions of GP use in production.

Hallak said Vast’s architecture gives it an advantage over hyperscale clouds built on older distributed computing models. “The hyperscalers built 10 years before we started,” he said. “Now that a new stack is getting built, they’re either going to partner with us or the need to start from scratch.”

Despite concerns about a potential AI investment bubble, the CEO said demand for infrastructure will continue to grow as new applications emerge. “Five years from now, AI is many orders of magnitude bigger than it is now,” he said.

The company is preparing for a potential initial public offering but has not set a timeline. “My expectation is that we will be ready by the end of this year,” Hallak told theCUBE, adding that there are no firm IPO plans.

For now, Vast is focused on expanding its platform as enterprises shift from experimentation to production-scale AI deployments. “In production means that it has to be up 100% of the time and extremely secure,” Hallak said. “We have clusters that are multi-exabyte in size with hundreds of thousands of GPUs.”

The round was led by Drive Capital LLC, co-led by Access Industries Inc. Existing investors Nvidia Corp., Fidelity Management & Research LLC and New Enterprise Associates Inc.

Photo: SiliconANGLE