VAST Data hits $30bn valuation after $1bn Series F round

VAST Data has closed a Series F funding round at a valuation of USD $30 billion, more than triple its Series E valuation in 2023.

The round was worth about USD $1 billion and included both primary and secondary capital. Drive Capital led the financing, Access Industries was co-lead, and investors included Fidelity Management & Research Company, NEA and NVIDIA, alongside new backers.

The financing comes as VAST reports more than USD $4 billion in cumulative bookings and over USD $500 million in committed annual recurring revenue. It also ended its previous fiscal year with a positive operating margin and positive free cash flow.

The deal gives VAST one of the highest private market valuations in the AI infrastructure sector, as investors continue to back companies tied to the buildout of data centres, model training systems and large-scale compute networks.

The fresh primary capital will support global expansion and strategic transactions aimed at broadening the company's technology footprint and partnerships. Founded in 2016, VAST sells software for managing data and computing resources used in AI systems.

In Australia, VAST is linked to two sovereign AI infrastructure projects. It provides the operating system for Firmus's sovereign AI factories, while Sharon AI, which is listed on Nasdaq and has Australian roots, uses VAST technology to support large GPU clusters in its sovereign AI infrastructure.

Growth metrics

VAST reported a Rule of 40-style score of 228% for its most recent fiscal year, a metric that combines growth and profitability. In venture capital circles, a score above 40% is generally considered healthy, while even top-performing software businesses often rank well below VAST's reported figure.

That performance is likely to draw attention because it suggests the company is expanding quickly while remaining profitable. Investors have become more selective in recent years, placing greater weight on revenue quality, recurring income and cash generation rather than growth alone.

VAST's rising valuation also reflects the rush to invest in the systems that support AI development. As companies race to train and deploy ever-larger models, demand has grown for software and data architectures that can manage large volumes of information across vast numbers of graphics processors.

Its systems are used in environments spanning millions of GPUs worldwide, according to the company. Customers it has cited include CoreWeave, Lowe's, the U.S. Air Force, Cursor, Mistral AI, JPMorganChase and Crusoe.

Founder and chief executive Renen Hallak linked the latest round to demand for systems that tie together applications, models and infrastructure.

"We are already supporting AI environments spanning millions of GPUs globally, operating across every layer of the AI stack. What is becoming clear is that these layers are no longer independent. Applications, models, and infrastructure now operate as a single system through data. VAST sits at the centre of how that system works, which is why we are seeing this level of demand at global scale," Hallak said.

Investor backing

The jump from USD $9.1 billion in late 2023 to USD $30 billion highlights how sharply investor appetite has shifted toward companies seen as supplying the infrastructure behind AI deployment. NVIDIA's participation is also notable, given the chipmaker's central role in AI computing and its growing investment activity across the wider ecosystem.

Chris Olsen, co-founder and partner at Drive Capital, said the firm sees VAST as part of a new infrastructure category created by rapid AI adoption.

"The scale and speed of AI adoption are creating a new class of infrastructure company. VAST is emerging as the clear leader in this category, with the architecture and momentum to support the world's most demanding AI environments. The step-change in valuation reflects both that momentum and our conviction in VAST's role at the centre of this market," Olsen said.

VAST argues that AI is reshaping how data and computing systems are built, bringing previously separate infrastructure layers closer together. Its platform is based on an architecture called DASE, short for Disaggregated Shared Everything, which it says was designed to rethink distributed systems for large-scale AI workloads.

That pitch has found a market among customers building and operating large training and inference environments. Timothée Lacroix, co-founder and chief technology officer of Mistral AI, described data management as central to model development at scale.

"As we push the boundaries of large-scale model training, the foundation of our infrastructure becomes critical. VAST's data platform enables us to efficiently manage and scale the massive datasets required to train frontier models, ensuring high performance and flexibility across our training pipelines," Lacroix said.

Larry Feinsmith, managing director and head of global tech strategy, innovation and partnerships at JPMorganChase, said: "The VAST platform is a key enabling technology for next gen AI infrastructure initiatives - providing a modern, flexible data architecture for Gen AI applications and agentic workflows."

Erwan Menard, SVP product management at Crusoe, said: "Our partnership with VAST Data has grown more than 10x this past year and continues to accelerate - a reflection of how critical an AI data platform is to training and inference workloads on Crusoe Cloud. Together, we've built a storage service which many model labs, leading AI agent companies, and physical AI pioneers rely on. This milestone for VAST validates the essential role they play in helping us give AI infrastructure engineers and developers the seamless, industrial-scale foundation they need to build the future of AI."