Vast Data, which when it closed its last big round of funding in late 2023 said it didn’t need the money, appears to be looking at this massive round as a way to give its early investors a big return on their investment.
Vast Data, developer of a platform combining storage, database, and compute to power AI and GPU-accelerated applications, appears set to close a new $1 billion round of funding, according to a report in Globes, an Israeli business publication.
Globes reported Thursday that Vast Data, which is headquartered in New York but has primary facilities in Israel, is looking to close the new funding round, which will give the company a valuation of about $30 million.
However, Globes reported, the funding is not aimed at injecting new capital into Vast Data but is instead focused on selling existing shares.
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“Most of the round, which is estimated at about $1 billion, is intended primarily as an opportunity for existing shareholders to sell shares and receive hundreds of millions of dollars, with an emphasis on early investors, founders, and long-time employees who have managed to exercise options,” Globes wrote.
Vast Data did not reply to a CRN request for information by press time.
The company is already one of the IT industry’s biggest “unicorns,” referring to startup companies valued at over $1 billion. Its investors include Nvidia and Dell Technologies Capital.
Vast Data is no stranger to big funding rounds. The company in late 2023 unveiled a Series B funding round worth $118 million, which at the time nearly tripled its valuation to $9.1 billion.’ At the time, company co-founder Jeff Denworth told CRN that Vast Data did not need that funding as the company was already cashflow positive and that all that money is just sitting around collecting interest.
The new funding round would give its early investors and long-term employees a strong return on their investment, Globes reported, noting that Greenfield Partners, which led that B round, could see a potential return of 40 times to 60 times its original investment.
Vast Data is developer of the Vast Data Platform which features the company’s Disaggregated Shared-Everything Architecture, or DASE. The technology is primarily targeted at helping businesses build AI-ready infrastructures.
DASE is a parallel architecture aimed at providing scalable, simple, resilient and efficient storage for AI and other modern applications. Its parallel distributed system supports the scale of the largest clouds and provides cloud-native services.
Last month the company introduced Vast Amplify, a new program that provides a structured path for helping businesses identify underutilized flash storage and then quickly qualify and repurpose the capacity of existing hardware into DASE.
Among Vast Data’s named customers is CoreWeave, which in November struck an agreement that will layer Vast Data’s AI operating software over the hyperscaler’s data to deliver “instant access to massive data sets.” The deal was valued at $1.17 billion.
Globes estimated that Vast Data currently has annual recurring revenue of $350 million to $400 million.
