Nvidia-Backed Vast Data Raises $1 Billion, Triples Valuation to $30 Billion

Vast Data raised approximately $1 billion in a Series F round announced April 22, tripling its valuation from $9.1 billion to $30 billion in one step. Drive Capital and Access Industries co-led the round, with participation from Nvidia, Fidelity, and NEA — all returning investors.

The numbers behind the raise are unusually strong for a company at this stage. Vast Data reports more than $4 billion in cumulative bookings, over $500 million in committed annual recurring revenue, and positive free cash flow. That last point matters: very few infrastructure companies at this valuation are operating in the black. The round includes both primary capital and a secondary component, giving employees and early investors liquidity ahead of a potential IPO.

What Vast Data builds is purpose-built storage software for AI workloads — training runs, inference caches, and the massive data pipelines that feed both. Traditional enterprise storage architectures weren’t designed for the access patterns that large language model training creates, and Vast Data’s DASE (Disaggregated and Shared Everything) architecture is built specifically for that gap. Nvidia’s continued participation as an investor is a signal: the world’s dominant AI chip maker is betting that storage infrastructure is the next bottleneck after compute.

The $30 billion valuation puts Vast Data alongside a short list of enterprise infrastructure companies that have grown this fast without being publicly traded. For context, Pure Storage — a publicly traded storage company — currently trades at roughly $16 billion. Vast Data is private, profitable by operating cash flow, and twice that market cap.

The competition is real but fragmented. NetApp, Dell EMC, and Pure Storage all offer some degree of AI-optimized storage, but none were purpose-built for the kind of GPU-intensive workloads that define modern AI infrastructure. Hyperscalers like AWS (S3), Google Cloud (GCS), and Azure Blob are also in the mix, but Vast Data’s pitch is on-premises and hybrid performance at a latency profile that cloud object storage can’t match for hot data.

The IPO question is now the loudest open variable. At $30 billion and positive cash flow, the company has the profile for a strong public debut. The secondary component of this round suggests both employees and early backers wanted some liquidity now — consistent with IPO planning horizons of 12 to 18 months out.

For infrastructure engineers, Vast Data is worth watching regardless of the financial theater. The combination of AI workload specialization, disaggregated architecture, and Nvidia’s backing makes it a serious contender in the stack that runs the next generation of AI deployments.