VAST Data raises $1B at a $30B valuation after 10 years building AI infrastructure for hedge funds, AI labs, and hyperscalers

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Uh, up next we have the founder and CEO, Vast Data. Uh, just hit a $30 billion valuation.

Congratulations. 1 billion series F.

Absolutely massive news. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

Good. How are you? Thanks for having me.

We're good. Uh would you mind uh just giving us a little bit of the journey, a little bit of background? I'd love to know uh all the things that went into uh building the company to this point since it's such a you know massive milestone.

Of course, it's been 10 years in the making. We started in 2016. Um,

we wanted uh to redo infrastructure. We thought AI required a new infrastructure stack way back then. If you remember 2016, it was a very very early days of AI, but it was already clear that you needed fast access to a lot of data to train these massive systems. And now we needed to infer and to fine-tune and for reinforce learning. And so we've been on this journey with AI throughout um its various evolutions. Uh we started from storage building a massive

Was there was there any any were there any points on that journey where you were like maybe maybe we were too early? Did we pick kind of the wrong category or was it kind of like steady you felt like there was steady progress being made and you had line of sight to getting to where you are now the entire time? We definitely did not have line of sight. Uh when we started, if you looked at my presentation that I built for myself, the last slide had a picture of a brain on it and it asked, can we build a thinking machine? I I'm not sure we still have today line of sight to doing that, but it it's been our north star. And over the years, we always partnered with the organizations that were on the bleeding edge of of AI. Before generative AI, it was hedge funds and life science institutes that were doing massive analytics uh using GPUs.

And then of course once generative AI hit, it became the labs and the AI clouds uh that became our biggest customers.

Yeah. Do do you have insight into how hedge funds are scaling uh compute resources? Uh I just saw didn't Jane Street invest a billion dollars in uh Coreweave and it seems like I saw another company that they funded that was doing custom silicon and it feels like they have an incredibly advanced uh compute stacks that are a little bit more opaque because uh they maybe just have a different recruiting flow or different public messaging flow.

Uh that is exactly right. In fact, Jane Street is a customer of ours both directly and through core and so we know them well. Um, we play in that space now for seven or eight years.

I found I found that before the big AI labs, uh, the hedge funds were the ones that had the biggest GPU clusters.

Um,

huh.

Yeah, they're they're ahead of their time and they're very secretive. So,

yeah,

we don't know much about what's going on there.

What about the social social networks and the social platforms? They feel like uh ad delivery is also potentially underrated as a source of like largecale machine learning, large scale compute clusters. We've seen you know Meta trained the llama model on the the the reals sized cluster that they built as sort of a bonus. But uh h how big is how big is that of a business for you and how how do you think it comps to the hedge fund world? I think the hedge fund world is a lot more secretive, but I would dare to say that it's bigger in terms of size. Um, there are very few of these metas out there. Um, and there are a lot more hedge funds.

Oh, interesting. Okay. Um, well, talk about uh what the next phase for your company is on the back of this financing round.

So, we're trying to fill in that software infrastructure layer. Uh Jensen gave a really good analogy of a five layer cake. Power, chips, infrastructure, models and applications.

We're that middle layer. We want to abstract this new hardware away from these new models and applications. We want to make it easy, make it secure for everybody to generate AI agents and use AI in production. Mhm.

And especially as we move from the labs into enterprises, uh I think it needs to be simplified. And it's always been that software infrastructure layer, what I call the operating system that took a new technology from new hardware and a killer app to making it widespread where everybody can use it. And I think we're at that moment um with AI and we're trying to do our part in in accelerating the adoption of AI. How have you been processing the the CPU shortage? Uh this idea that like as agents get more and more robust, they need more CPU. They need to be fed. You got to feed the GPUs. Uh is that something that you're working on particularly or do you have a view on the uh the overall uh just just CPU shortage which sort of blindsided I think a lot of people in tech who had been following the the GPU ramps but then they're saying, "Oh, well, what what's going on with the CPU crunch? I think these AI factories are bigger pieces of technology than we've ever built before. It includes CPUs, it includes DPUs, it includes GPUs, in some cases it includes TPUs. Use

DPUs. Can you break that down?

The data processing unit.

Oh, data. Okay. Yeah.

Yes. Um, and so all of these chips are in high demand. Uh, we're seeing a NAND shortage. uh that's extremely severe right now. We're seeing a memory shortage

and so I don't think there's anything that is um of abundant supply right now. The fabs need to be built out. Nobody was expecting this type of curve in the growth of AI

and I think it's going to continue for definitely a few years to come if not many years to come.

Yeah.

And so the hardware vendors need to build out a lot faster than they have been.

Yeah. Can you uh walk me through at a deeper level your relationship with coreweave and how that fits together? I think a lot of people uh think of coreweave as servicing you know the the the the the companies that are training and inferencing models specifically. Uh what are you getting out of that partnership?

So Cororeweave has been an amazing partner for us. They're the biggest of these new AI clouds like uh Nscale and Crusoe and Lambda. You see them around the world also as um sovereign clouds.

Yeah.

And basically uh they're building this new stack and they're making it easy for end users to consume this new stack in a cloud um environment.

Um we're just the software builders.

Sure. And so we try to provide them with as much software as we can such that they can turn that around into cloud services whether it's a storage service or a database service or a streaming service

um as we add more and more layers uh of this stack. Those are the things that are required um from those end users.

Okay. So we I mean we were just talking to the president of Adobe. Uh it sounds like Adobe is doing inference and they're training some models and they're doing a lot of different things. They might go to coreweave and then vast data might be powering the software underneath and they might not even necessarily have a direct relationship with you because they're getting uh just access to the best possible product from coreweave directly effectively. Is that right?

It is right. Adobe specifically does have a direct relationship with us. Uh most of these larger enterprises Yeah. tend to have uh both a cloud environment that they're leveraging and on prem and hypers scale

and what we've built what we call a data space

sure

basically allows them to do all three of those and have one abstraction layer um that enables a seamless experience

interesting

uh given given your exposure to the to the world of hedge funds are there a bunch more situational awareness fairnessesque funds that have absolutely printed over the last

uh year or so but just done it a lot more quietly and the west coast kind of hasn't picked up on it.

That's a really good question. Uh I actually met those guys from situational awareness a couple weeks ago. Uh they have a really interesting view into the future and I think they're capitalizing on that view for every phase as as it unrolls. I am not the right person to ask because those funds tend to not have as much infrastructure. The ones that we work with tend to be more quant driven.

Um

situational aware awareness I think is just a few very smart people. They don't need that much compute power.

Yeah. Yeah. It's more macro research

doing it the oldfashioned way with with guts.

Yeah. Yeah. I love it.

Conviction.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean conversations and research and having a having a contrarian view. Uh well, congratulations on the round. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Uh

yeah, great to meet you.

Fantastic.

Appreciate you breaking it down.

We'll talk to you soon.

Thank you.

Have a good one. Uh

yeah, can you imagine situational awareness with uh couple gigawatts of compute under the hood? Anything's possible at that level. Uh I was

What was that what was that copy trading profile? Uh you know the one I'm talking about where you can like create the Nancy Pelosi autopilot autopilot. Uh autopilot has a tracker for uh situational awareness.

Every time they they post about it, they use this like AI image of him. It doesn't really look anything like

No, no, no. But but there's so few images of Leupold on the internet that that AI image has just become like what mainstream media will pull from for him because they just assume that that's actually him and it's not. But it's just very funny that it's

a man who has only appeared on Dwar Cash.

Yes,

there's no other there's only video of him.

SPF just posted his full holdings. If