INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
VAST Data, a startup that has come up with a cost-effective way to deliver flash storage, announced a $100 million Series C investment today
on a $1.2 billion valuation, both unusually big numbers for an enterprise startup in Series C territory.Next47, the investment arm of
Siemens, led the round with participation from existing investors 83North, Commonfund Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Goldman Sachs,
Greenfield Partners, Mellanox Capital and Norwest Venture Partners
Investors believe that VAST is solving a difficult problem around scaled storage
CEO Renen Hallak.As Hallak points out, traditional storage is delivered in tiers with fast, high-cost flash storage at the top of the
pyramid all the way down to low-cost archival storage at the bottom
He sees this approach as flawed, especially for modern applications driven by analytics and machine learning that rely on lots of data being
This as fast or faster than your tier one, all-flash system today and as cost effective, or more so, than your lowest tier five hard drives
We do this at scale with the resilience of the entire [traditional storage] pyramid
TechCrunch.The company, which was founded in 2016 and came to market with its first solution in 2018, does this by taking advantage of some
modern tools like Intel 3D XPoint technology, a kind of modern non-volatile memory along with consumer-grade QLC flash, NVMe over Fabrics
allows us to move beyond scalability limits, resiliency limits and problems that other systems have in terms of usability and
They intend to use the money to grow quickly, which is saying something in the current economic climate.But Hallak sees vast opportunity for
the kinds of companies with large amounts of data who need this kind of solution, and even though the cost is high, he says ultimately
switching to VAST should save companies money, something they are always looking to do at this kind of scale, but even more so right now.You
Health, General Dynamics and Zebra as customers.
