For almost thirty years, enterprise storage has been built on the concept of tiers. Simply put, the notion of tiered storage assumes that data is segmented into categories — hot, warm and cold — and then stored on the medium that makes the most sense based on its importance to day-to-day operations. But in a world where fast access to all data has become an existential necessity for most companies, the process of deciding how to tier it has become a complex trade-off between speed, efficiency and cost. Making access to data faster and cheaper has become big business for legacy enterprise technology vendors and given rise to several high-profile startups in the past decade. Yet the concept of tiering still remains, in part due to technology readiness and the incumbents’ reluctance to cannibalize their own solutions.
Enter, VAST Data. This startup, which was founded in 2016 by engineers with deep roots in enterprise storage, is disrupting traditional storage architectures by making performant flash technology affordable for all applications. Leveraging multiple recent technological developments, including QLC Flash, 3DXPoint and NVMeOF, the company has developed a new architecture for storage which they call Universal Storage.
The result is an affordable, tier-free, simple and fast solution that answers the highest performance needs of the most data intensive applications, at exabyte scale. Since launching its product, the company has won industry awards and attracted significant customer interest from the world’s largest brands.
Today, we’re excited to announce we’re leading the $100 Million Series C funding round for this revolutionary storage company which is now valued at $1.2 Billion. We invested in the company because we believe they have the right team and the right technology to revolutionize the enterprise storage market.
VAST Data is already having great success in industries with data-intensive workloads such as life sciences, financial services, content creation and distribution, and artificial intelligence. Given the world’s most valuable resource is now data, we believe strongly in VAST’s opportunity to capture marketshare globally. And that’s where our Next47 Catalyst team comes in. With relationships spanning hundreds of large multinationals around the world, our team is already working with VAST Data to expand their global reach and accelerate their revenue growth.
VAST Data wants to help companies get to a state where IT deployments enable new business capabilities, rather than limit them. Next47 strongly believes in their vision, their technology and their potential. We look forward to partnering with them to further scale their business.
