VAST Data raises $1B at $30B valuation

VAST Data said on April 22 that it closed a Series F financing valuing the company at $30 billion, with the total transaction worth about $1 billion. (vastdata.com) Drive Capital led the round and Access Industries was co-lead. Existing investors including Nvidia, Fidelity Management & Research Company and NEA also participated, VAST said. (vastdata.com) (cnbc.com) The valuation is more than triple VAST’s $9.1 billion Series E mark from late 2023. The company said the financing included both primary capital for VAST and secondary capital for existing shareholders. (vastdata.com) (reuters.com) VAST sells the software layer that stores, organizes and serves data to artificial intelligence systems. In plain terms, it is trying to make sure expensive graphics processing units are fed data fast enough to stay busy. (cnbc.com) (vastdata.com) That pitch has become easier to sell as companies build larger AI clusters. VAST said its systems already support environments spanning millions of graphics processing units, and it named customers including CoreWeave, Lowe’s, the U.S. Air Force and Cursor. (vastdata.com) (cnbc.com) The company also used the fundraise to show operating scale. CNBC reported that VAST has surpassed $4 billion in cumulative bookings and exited its previous fiscal year with more than $500 million in committed annual recurring revenue. (cnbc.com) Reuters said investor demand for AI infrastructure helped drive the jump in valuation. CNBC, citing Dealroom, said AI companies globally have already raised $280.5 billion this year, with more than $170 billion going to OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. (reuters.com) (cnbc.com) The structure of the round also stands out. Bloomberg and Reuters both reported that the financing included a secondary component, which lets early employees and investors sell shares without forcing the company into an immediate initial public offering. (bloomberg.com) (reuters.com) For now, VAST is being priced less like a storage vendor and more like a core supplier to the AI buildout. The new round says investors think the bottleneck is no longer only chips, but the data systems wrapped around them. (cnbc.com) (vastdata.com)