Israeli-founded data storage startup raises $100 million
The C funding round, including investors Next47, Goldman, Dell Technologies, brings NYC-based VAST Data’s valuation to $1.2 billion, startup says
Shoshanna Solomon was The Times of Israel's Startups and Business reporter
VAST Data, an Israel-founded startup that has developed technology to consolidate all of a firm’s data into one storage system, said Thursday it has raised $100 million in Series C funding, led by Next47, a venture firm backed by Siemens.
The round, which brings the company’s total funding to $180 million, almost triples the value of the firm since its launch in February 2019 to $1.2 billion, the startup said in a statement.
The latest funding round includes participation from past investors as well as new investors, including 83North, Commonfund Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greenfield Partners, Mellanox Capital and Norwest Venture Partners, the statement said.
The new funding will be used to drive global expansion and accelerate the company’s next phase of growth, according to the firm.
The firm, co-founded by two Israelis, Renen Hallak and Shachar Feinblit, with Jeff Dunworth, is headquartered in New York City, and has a development team in Israel. The startup’s technology consists of an all flash storage platform that it says “revolutionizes” the economics of flash storage to make flash infrastructure affordable for all kinds of data, “thereby rendering the hard drive and storage tiering obsolete.”
The technology can be applied to a number of industries, the statement said.
“We started VAST Data with a single mission, to simplify the data center and to enable insights that were never before possible,” said Hallak, the co-founder and CEO of VAST Data, in the statement. “In 2019, VAST’s early customer adoption and financial performance surpassed all historic benchmarks — validating that the technology and product-market fit were right for customers who are struggling under tiered storage architectures and the limitations of the hard drive.”
Considering that the startup has not yet tapped into its $40 million series B financing, “the firm now has a $140 million war chest” to meet global customer demand, he said.
The firm’s technology is being sold to customers worldwide, the statement said, including the US National Institutes of Health, an agency operated by the US Department of Health and Human Services; Harvard Medical School; Zebra Medical; and some Fortune 500 companies.
The firm is planning to recruit some 100 new workers “as it prepares for the next wave of customer adoption,” the statement added.
