At Norwest, we look to back early-stage entrepreneurs who have strong domain expertise and are building ahead of the market. When Norwest General Partner Dror Nahumi first met VAST Data founder and CEO Renen Hallak back in 2015, Renen shared his vision of breaking decades of storage tradeoffs to eliminate infrastructure complexity and application bottlenecks for enterprise businesses.
Following our success backing up storage companies like ScaleIO, our team understood the opportunity and had deep conviction in the solution that the team was building. In 2016, we partnered with Dell Technologies Capital and 83North to lead the company’s initial financing round. Following this round, Renen added Jeff Denworth, Shachar Fienblit, and Alon Horev as co-founders and the infrastructure to what VAST Data has become.
VAST started out by creating 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 architecture into a full data and computing platform, all while adapting to the growing needs of its customers as AI and machine learning proliferated.
Today, the VAST AI Operating System supports AI cloud providers, enterprises, and public sector environments, including xAI, CoreWeave, Anyscale, and Crowdstrike, among many other cutting-edge global organizations. These customers rely on VAST to run large-scale environments that power millions of GPUs and production AI workloads.
VAST’s partnership with NVIDIA further reinforces its unique positioning in the modern AI stack. Working closely with NVIDIA, VAST enables customers to run data services and AI workloads as a single, integrated system. This tight coupling of data and compute reduces architectural complexity and enables the high levels of performance the market requires.
It’s been a privilege to witness VAST’s industry-leading innovation, rapid global customer adoption, and massive company growth.
Just this week, the company achieved another major milestone. VAST announced its Series F at a $30 billion valuation. The valuation represents more than a threefold increase from its $9.1 billion Series E valuation in 2023, a testament to the company’s leadership in the rapidly growing AI ecosystem and standing as one of the most valuable private data infrastructure software companies in history.
Our journey with VAST reflects our approach to partnering with category-defining companies. We identify technical inflection points before they become obvious and back founders building ahead of where the market is going.
The ambition Renen and the team have brought to each phase of the company’s evolution gives us every reason to believe in what comes next.
Looking ahead, as AI increases pressure on data infrastructure in specific ways, including larger datasets, higher throughput, more complex pipelines, and higher performance requirements, we believe VAST will continue to play a central role in driving the future of AI at global scale. The next constraints are emerging around how data is stored, accessed, utilized, and moved across systems, and VAST continues to redefine the next frontier on these challenges.
Congratulations to Renen, and the entire VAST Data team!
– The Norwest team
