Photo Credit: Emily from Pixabay

According to a recent report, the AI data management market, which includes companies that provide the ability to store, process, and access data, is expected to grow at 23% CAGR to reach $70.2 billion by 2028. New York-based VAST Data is a strong player in the industry.

VAST Data’s Offerings

VAST Data was founded in 2016 by Renen Hallak, Jeff Denworth, Shachar Fienblit, and Alon Horev. The company was set up with a vision to create a data management platform to improve AI workload capabilities. The founding team designed a new storage architecture and software infrastructure layer that integrates storage, database, and compute engine services to power AI and GPU-accelerated workloads across different data centers and clouds. The company operated in stealth mode till 2019, post which it reached out to customers.

Unlike hyperconverged infrastructure that focuses on virtualization management, Vast’s platform offers a high performance file and object storage system integrated with a transactional and analytical database. Thus, if there is a deep learning application looking at certain images, the information about the images becomes more useful when labels and learnings annotated about those images are cataloged in a large-scale, high-performance database.

Vast’s offering not only provides access to the raw data payload but also the contextual layer in that database. Vast’s platform is built on the belief that one can integrate everything to make it easy for customers to compute. It is designed to be optimized for unstructured data, or files and objects such as videos, imagery, and sound that are not naturally present in an enterprise data warehouse or database. Vast helps curate, annotate, and understand unstructured data for its customers.

VAST Data’s Financials

VAST Data is privately held and does not disclose detailed financials. But it has reported strong growth over the past few years. Last December, the company had crossed $1 billion in cumulative software bookings, more than tripling year over year. The company claims that it has a 90% gross margin, and recently achieved $200 million annual recurring revenue rate.

The company has been cash flow positive for over a year and has a diverse customer base including names like Booking Holdings, the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Energy, Verizon, Boston Children’s Hospital, Pixar, and Zoom. VAST has also established a strong footing in the industry through its partnerships with NVIDIA and HPE. It has achieved NVIDIA’s DGX SuperPOD certification and boasts of HPE using its technology in its HPE for GreenLake File Storage, an offering from HPE to help customers meet the demands of AI.

VAST has raised $381 million in funding so far with investments from Fidelity Ventures with participation from New Enterprise Associates, BOND Capital, Drive Capital, Nvidia, Dell, Goldman Sachs, Tiger Global, Commonfund, Norwest, 83North, Greenfield, and Next47. Its last round of funding was held in December 2023 when it raised $118 million at a valuation of $9.1 billion. An earlier round held in 2021 had valued it at $3.7 billion. The company hired a CFO late last year that fueled talks that it may be looking to go public. But VAST has not commented on the possibility.

There is a slew of AI-focused database companies right now. VAST’s biggest competition comes from the likes of Databricks, Rubrik, Cohesity, and others that are able to offer a similar product. However, the AI market is in such a strong growth position that there seems to be room for almost everyone to grow.

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