The company’s latest round of fundraise brings its total fundraising amount to US$380 million, and its valuation tripled to US$9.1 billion. Fidelity Ventures led its latest round of funding, with participation from Nvidia, Goldman Sachs and Tiger Global and others.
VAST Data’s choice of Singapore as its regional headquarters comes on the back of the country’s roots in being an established regional hub for data centres, according to the firm.
Moreover, Singapore is also home to many specialised cloud service providers (CSPs) propping up these data centres — known for razor-thin margins and are fielding demands from enterprise, government and research institutions for graphics processing unit (GPU)-powered offerings.
VAST Data’s co-founder and CEO Renen Hallak says that the firm has built the first and only AI native platform that exists today.
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“Computers were historically very good at analysing structured data — numbers, rows, and columns of a database. Today, what we’re seeing is that they’re beginning to understand unstructured information — pictures, videos, sounds, things that only people were able to understand before,” he says.
Some of VAST Data’s customers include Disney, who used to “struggle with performance bottlenecks to accessing their data”, according to Hallak. With the integration of VAST, Disney has managed to augment their animators with AI abilities to help them operate faster and more effectively.
Disney told Hallak that two of its latest animation films — Soul and Elemental — could not have been developed if it were not for VAST.
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Meanwhile, VAST Data is anticipating the most interest in its products from governments, the financial services sector, insurance companies, banks, research centres and universities as they expand their business across Asia Pacific.
VAST Data says that it has not used the money raised in its latest funding round, as it has been operating on a cash flow positive. Instead, Hallak says that the participation from big name investors lends credibility to its reputation.
“We've never built a US$100 billion company that we're trying to build right now. Having these partners around the table that have built great companies and have seen great companies being built on allows us to avoid some of the pitfalls that they are aware of,” he says. “It also gives our customers confidence that we're going to be here forever, and we're going to innovate on their behalf, and we're not dependent on external capital.”
