Vast Data Raises $1B at $30B Valuation as AI Storage Demand Surges

Vast Data raised roughly $1 billion on March 16, 2026, in a funding round that values the AI storage software maker at $30 billion — more than triple the $9.1 billion valuation it carried after its December 2023 Series E, according to reporting from Calcalist. The deal stands as the largest private financing round ever closed by an Israeli technology company.

The round was co-led by Drive Capital and Access Industries, with existing backers Nvidia, Fidelity and NEA (New Enterprise Associates) participating. Roughly half the capital — more than $500 million — is a secondary transaction, with shares sold by early investors and employees at an approximate 15% discount to the headline valuation, per Calcalist. The remainder is primary capital flowing to the company's balance sheet.

Inside the Nvidia-backed startup's jump from $9.1B to $30B

The structure — blending primary funding with a large secondary tender — lets employees and early backers take liquidity while the company preserves optionality on an initial public offering. CEO Renen Hallak told Bloomberg that Vast should be ready for a public listing by year-end 2026 but will decide separately whether to proceed. Hallak has previously told bankers and staff that an IPO in the second half of 2026 or later is on the table, The Information reported in August 2025.

The approach reflects a broader pattern among late-stage AI infrastructure companies, which are using jumbo private rounds to defer public scrutiny while demand for GPU-adjacent services runs hot. For context, Nvidia's H100 and Blackwell-class GPUs — the chips powering most frontier AI training — require specialized high-throughput storage to keep them fed with data, which is the category Vast sells into.

How Vast Data's AI infrastructure funding compares to rivals

Vast sells software and appliances designed to replace legacy storage and database systems for AI training and inference workloads. Customers include JPMorgan, Elon Musk's xAI and CoreWeave — the last of which inked a $1.17 billion commercial agreement with Vast in November 2025. The company is profitable on an operating basis, and co-founder Jeff Denworth said at the company's VAST Forward event in March that Vast is "generating more than $100 million of cash per quarter, every quarter," per HPCwire.

Hallak has said cumulative sales have reached roughly $4 billion since Vast launched a decade ago, with most of that booked in the past year. Industry estimates peg annual recurring revenue at approximately $2 billion by the end of 2025, up from around $200 million in late 2023.

Part of the fresh capital is earmarked for acquisitions and minority investments across the AI stack, alongside expansion partnerships with funds in the UAE and Singapore. Vast hired CFO Amy Shapero — formerly CFO at Shopify — about 18 months ago to prepare the company for a potential listing.

The $30 billion mark places Vast just below the $32 billion that Wiz fetched in its pending sale to Google, making Vast the most valuable private tech company in Israel by a thin margin