VAST Data Cements Status as One of the Most Successful Enterprise Software Companies in Modern History After Third Consecutive Record-Breaking Year
Exiting its third year with a bookings run rate of nearly $300 million at 90% gross margin, 3.8x YoY
Cash-flow positive since the last funding round, powered by a $1.2 million average selling price
Net Revenue Retention (NRR) of over 300%; recommended by 100% of customers surveyed
VAST is rapidly becoming the data foundation for a $400 billion AI Data Platform opportunity
VAST Data, the data platform company for the AI-powered world, unveiled its massive global growth during FY2022 (ending January 31, 2022). During this period, VAST saw unprecedented customer adoption and diversification, financial performance, and international expansion. VAST Data Universal Storage software is now entrusted by customers to manage and process over three exabytes of information globally.
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“It’s not hyperbolic to say that data means everything”
In just its third year of selling, VAST grew 3.8x year over year (YoY), closing out the year at a nearly $300 million software bookings run rate. VAST Data ended its year cash flow positive, only adding to its cash balance since its Series D funding was announced in April of 2021.
Key success metrics and business strategies that supported VAST’s hypergrowth in FY22 include:
- Unparalleled Customer Growth. VAST more than doubled its customer roster YoY expanding across industries including autonomous driving, life sciences, media and entertainment, financial trading, and government institutions with increasing demand in new market segments. On average, VAST’s software manages around 12 petabytes (PBs) per customer, with the company’s largest customer having already selected VAST software to manage more than 240PBs of data.
- Predictable and Scalable Business. Customers continue to love and scale their VAST investments. Net revenue retention (NRR) exceeded 300% during FY22, demonstrating massive data growth and confidence in Universal Storage from existing VAST customers.
- Universal Storage is Universally Loved. VAST Data received extremely high marks as noted through the Gartner Peer Insights anonymous customer review program. VAST customers have exhibited the highest recommender rating, with 100% of the organizations submitting reviews saying they would recommend Universal Storage.
- Worldwide Expansion. VAST expanded operations across five continents, building out new teams in the U.K., France, Germany, Israel, Turkey, Czech Republic, Middle East, Australia, New Zealand, and Korea. FY23 will see additional expansion in the Benelux region, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, the Nordics, and Japan. Additionally, the company nearly doubled headcount from the previous year, and expects to continue this growth trajectory during its FY23.
- A Seamless Software Offering. In April 2021, VAST changed the industry with its Gemini offering, a new business model that combines the commercial advantages of software with the simple appliance experience customers love, aligning VAST’s operating objectives with the needs of its customers. The adoption of the Gemini model across VAST customers has been both rapid and comprehensive, resulting in strong annual recurring revenue (ARR) and a business model built on software gross margins.
- Disrupting Legacy Strongholds, Accelerating New Discoveries. Over the past year, customers turned to VAST’s Universal Storage platform to help solve their strategic data challenges. For AI, VAST is working with companies like NVIDIA to make the shift from experimental to production AI in the enterprise. For data protection, VAST is bucking the traditional model of purpose-built backup appliances, working with partners like Commvault, to bring rapid backups and fast restores for instant data recovery in the event of a ransomware attack, disaster or rogue employee. And for data analytics, customers like Agoda (a Booking Holdings subsidiary) selected VAST as the data science backbone for its big data and machine learning environment.
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In looking at the recent history of start-up companies across the enterprise data stack, VAST far outpaces the time horizon to $300 million annual run rate. VAST Data was able to reach this key software-only milestone in just three years of selling, whereas many of today’s most successful software and SaaS companies have needed up to a decade to achieve a similar milestone. Read this blog post by VAST Data’s Jeff Denworth for a deeper analysis.
“It’s not hyperbolic to say that data means everything,” said VAST Data founder and CEO Renen Hallak. “From groundbreaking medical research to award-winning cinematic experiences, VAST’s customers are working to expand the boundaries of what’s possible in various aspects of our daily lives. Our singular goal is to empower AI-driven innovation with accessible, infinitely scalable data intelligence. What we’ve accomplished in just a few years’ time is incredible — and we’re just getting started.”
AI continues to be driving the need for new high-performance data platforms that can easily scale as organizations’ data demands grow. This significant growth comes as ARK Invest and others predict that the market capitalization of AI software and hardware companies could scale at a roughly 50 percent annualized rate, hitting $87 trillion by 2030. Of that, the data platforms that power AI are predicted to represent a $400 billion market over the next decade.
With its Universal Storage platform, VAST has created a next generation all-flash data platform that addresses the challenges and compromises of scale, performance, efficiency, and cost, to better meet the demands of today’s data-deluged and AI-powered enterprises in a new era of machine intelligence. Maintaining consistent application uptime and integrity is equally important to realizing the key feature benefits of Universal Storage. The company surpassed an impressive milestone over the past year, reaching 99.9999 percent data availability across the entire install base. Read this blog post to learn more about VAST’s impressive Rule of Nines achievement with its Universal Storage platform.
Quotes from Around the Industry
Visit the VAST website for commentary about how VAST Data helps customers from around the world solve their data challenges.
“The way organizations interact with data has morphed tremendously over the past two decades, and legacy solutions are no longer compatible with modern needs,” said Tom Mendoza, current VAST Data Board Member and former President and Vice Chairman at NetApp. “By simplifying data architecture and eliminating the need to choose between performance and cost, VAST has raised the bar for this industry.”
“Only a few enterprise storage vendors have started with a blank sheet of paper to create a software-defined storage architecture optimized for hyperscale data storage and computing technologies, and VAST Data is far and away the most successful of these vendors,” said Eric Burgener, research vice president, Infrastructure Systems Group at IDC. “Its continued revenue growth rates make a compelling argument that this is the storage architecture of the digitally transformed future.”
“VAST Data has quickly established itself as a standout in the crowded data infrastructure market, charting a unique path to becoming one of the leading data platform companies for the AI future,” said Daniel Newman, principal analyst and founding partner at Futurum Research.
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