Vast Data Closes $118M Series E, More Than Doubles Valuation

AI data platform startup Vast Data raised a $118 million Series E led by Fidelity Management and Research Co., jumping the company’s valuation to $9.1 billion.

The new valuation is a significant spike from its previous valuation of $3.7 billion set in 2021. New Enterprise Associates, Bond Capital and Drive Capital also took part in the new round.

Vast’s data storage platform is optimized for AI workloads across datacenters and clouds, allowing customers to manage both structured and unstructured data to generate insights.

“A new AI data stack is required,” said co-founder and CEO Renen Hallak in a release. “To be truly impactful in this era of AI and deep learning, you not only want to have a lot of data, but also high quality data that is correctly organized and available at the right place, at the right time. The VAST Data Platform delivers AI infrastructure that opens the door to automated discovery that can solve some of humanity’s most complex challenges.”

The company already has seen significant growth. At the end of its fiscal year third quarter, Vast Data had surpassed $1 billion in cumulative software bookings — a 3.3x year-to-year growth rate. It also maintained positive cash flow for the last 12 quarters.

The new valuation was reported earlier this week by The Information. Per that report, the company will use some of the proceeds of the new round to buy back stock from existing shareholders.

Fidelity’s recent run

This is not the first headline grabbing move for Fidelity Management and Research this week.

On Monday, it led a $642 million minority investment in AI cloud infrastructure company CoreWeave — which saw its valuation hit $7 billion. The new valuation — as reported by Bloomberg — is a significant jump from late May, when the company extended its Series B at a $2 billion valuation.

Those valuations are yet another sign of investors’ unsated appetite for AI-related infrastructure platforms and tools.

Founded in 2016, Vast has raised $381 million, per Crunchbase.