Vast Data Valued at $30 Billion as AI Drives a New Infrastructure Stack
New funding reflects Vast's rare combination of growth and profitability, driven by its central role in powering AI infrastructure at global scale
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on April 23, 2026 at 2:01 pmVast Data, an AI operating system company, announced the closing of its Series F financing at a $30 billion valuation, representing more than a threefold increase from its $9.1 billion Series E valuation in late 2023.
The latest round was led by Drive Capital, with Access Industries acting as co-lead, and included participation from existing investors including Fidelity Management & Research Company, NEA, and Nvidia, alongside new investors. This financing reflects the accelerating demand for a new data infrastructure stack needed for the development and deployment of artificial generally intelligent systems.
The financing included primary and secondary capital, bringing the total transaction value to approximately $1 billion. Primary proceeds will be used by Vast Data to solidify its position as the AI operating system at the center of the AI ecosystem and to further fuel global growth, including strategic transactions that expand its technology footprint and partnerships.
The Data Computing Foundation That Is Enabling AI at Global Scale
AI is a generational shift set to reshape trillions of dollars of global economic activity. This is now materializing as a massive industrial buildout approaching $100 trillion in scale, spanning AI factories and software systems, powered by a new era of parallel computing at levels previously unimaginable.
Founded in 2016 at the dawn of deep learning, Vast Data reimagined distributed systems for a future where AI would demand a fundamentally new approach to data and compute. Starting from a blank sheet of paper, the company created DASE (Disaggregated Shared Everything), a new architecture designed to break longstanding tradeoffs between scale, simplicity, performance, and cost.
Over the following decade, Vast expanded this foundation into a full data and computing platform aligned to the subsequent waves of modern AI. Today, the Vast AI operating system sits at the center of this transformation, unifying data, compute, and real-time processing into a single system. This architecture collapses traditionally separate layers of the stack, enabling organizations to build, train, and run AI models while powering the applications and agents that depend on them, all at global scale.
Commercially, the Vast AI OS has become an essential component of the global AI datacenter buildout. From CoreWeave to Lowe’s, from the U.S. Air Force to Cursor, thousands of organizations rely on Vast to store, contextualize, and act on data, supporting environments that power millions of GPUs and some of the world’s most advanced AI training and inference initiatives.
“We are already supporting AI environments spanning millions of GPUs globally, operating across every layer of the AI stack,” said Renen Hallak, founder and CEO, Vast Data. “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 center of how that system works, which is why we are seeing this level of demand at global scale.”
High Growth, Built for Durability
The company has surpassed $4 billion in cumulative bookings and exited the previous fiscal year with more than $500 million in Committed Annual Recurring Revenue (CARR), along with positive operating margin and free cash flow. In its most recent fiscal year, Vast Data delivered a Rule of X score of 228%, reflecting an unparalleled combination of rapid growth and strong profitability.
As organizations scale AI, they are prioritizing partners that are not only providing disruptive technology, but who also are building sustainable, professional and financially-durable businesses that can continue to innovate and support the world’s AI infrastructure. This Rule of 228% is testament to VAST being optimally positioned to support the largest and most demanding AI environments with near-infinite runway to continue its growth trajectory.
Industry Validation and Customer Momentum
“The scale and speed of AI adoption are creating a new class of infrastructure company,” said Chris Olsen, co-founder and partner, Drive Capital. “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 center of this market.”
“As we push the boundaries of large-scale model training, the foundation of our infrastructure becomes critical,” said Timothée Lacroix, co-founder and CTO, Mistral AI. “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.”
“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,” said Larry Feinsmith, MD, Hhead, global tech strategy, innovation and partnerships, JPMorganChase.
Comments
This confirms once again what we reported a few weeks ago. The valuation is nothing short of extraordinary, reflecting a spectacular and singular growth trajectory driven by an exceptionally talented engineering team, early and well-anticipated market positioning, and strong backing from key investors. Frankly, this is a remarkable achievement, and the market has rarely witnessed anything like it. The only comparable stories are AI-centric companies such as Cursor, OpenAI, Anthropic, or xAI to name a few.
Founded in 2016 as a storage software company purpose-built for AI infrastructure, Vast Data has now raised a cumulative $1.4 billion. The company first made its mark by demonstrating that NFS was not the core I/O bottleneck, leveraging its innovative DASE architecture, a design built on storage-class memory, NVMe SSDs, NVMe-oF, and a container model, complemented by purpose-built file services, and more recently extended to S3 and even block storage. From there, Vast Data progressively introduced a broad set of advanced data services, ultimately positioning itself around the concept of an AI operating system, a notion that has since sparked considerable debate across the industry.
This trajectory is a compelling real-world illustration of what Coldago Research introduced nearly 15 years ago with its U3 model - Universal, Unified, and Ubiquitous storage - a vision that Vast Data appears to be bringing to life at scale.
Subscribe to our free daily newsletter
