VAST Data Raises Series F at $30B Valuation to Expand Its AI Data Operating System

VAST Data just stepped into the room, didn’t knock, and left a $30B valuation sitting on the table like it owns the lease. Series F, roughly $1B in the mix, led by Drive Capital with Access Industries riding shotgun, and a supporting cast that reads like a who’s who of serious capital. NVIDIA, Fidelity, NEA. Not tourists. Builders backing builders.

Now pause on the name for a second. VAST. Not subtle. Not trying to be. When your whole thesis is that data, compute, and real time processing shouldn’t live in separate neighborhoods, you don’t brand small. You unify the sprawl and call it an operating system. Renen Hallak, CEO, didn’t come here to babysit legacy infrastructure, and Alon Horev, CTO, is not wiring together yesterday’s tech with tomorrow’s expectations. Alongside them, Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder, and Shachar Fienblit, Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer, round out a founding bench that saw where this was going before most people figured out the question.

Founded in 2016, this crew saw the constraint early. Data was growing faster than the pipes could handle, compute was scaling but not coordinating, and real time was more aspiration than reality. So they built DASE, Disaggregated Shared Everything, which sounds academic until you realize it’s basically telling tradeoffs to get out of the room. Performance, scale, simplicity, resilience. Pick all 4. That’s the bet.

And the market responded like it’s been waiting. Over $4B in cumulative bookings. More than $500M in committed annual recurring revenue. A Rule of X at 228%, which is the kind of number that makes spreadsheets sit up straighter. Thousands of organizations in the mix, with over 25% of the Fortune 100 already plugged in. CoreWeave, JPMorganChase, Mistral AI. Not exactly beta testers.

Behind the scenes, this isn’t a one-act show. Michael Wing, President, keeps the engine running at scale, while Amy Shapero, CFO, Marianne Budnik, CMO, and Rick Scurfield, CRO, translate growth into something durable. Asaf Levy, Chief Architect, and Andy Pernsteiner, Field CTO, make sure the system actually does what the story promises. Scott Buell, Chief Legal Officer, and Karmit Shitrit, VP Human Resources, keep the structure tight as the company stretches globally.

Then there’s the boardroom, where Lak Ananth, Tom Mendoza, Gary Reiner, Ajay Shah, and Yoram Snir bring pattern recognition from cycles most people only read about, with Ehud Rokach in the advisor seat adding another layer of signal to the noise.

This round isn’t just fuel, it’s positioning. VAST Data is planting itself dead center in the AI ecosystem and daring anyone to route around it. The play is clear. If AI is the engine, VAST wants to be the operating system that decides how fast it runs and where it goes.

There’s a lesson here for anyone building in this cycle. You don’t win by stacking tools. You win by collapsing complexity. While others were busy optimizing pieces, VAST Data rewired the whole board. That’s how you go from infrastructure vendor to category gravity, and once that shift locks in, the rest of the market starts playing catch up whether it admits it or not.