Vast Data secures $1.17 billion deal with CoreWeave

Israeli startup Vast Data, one of the most valuable private technology companies in the country, has signed a major new deal with CoreWeave worth $1.17 billion. The expanded agreement marks a significant milestone for Vast, which provides core infrastructure for AI data centers.

Vast’s software serves as a data management platform - the foundational layer that enables the rapid storage, retrieval, and organization of information. Without Vast’s technology, equipping data centers with expensive Nvidia GPUs would have little impact, since AI systems rely as much on data accessibility as on computational power. In essence, Vast’s platform functions as an operating system for AI, transforming raw processing capability into usable intelligence.

Vast Data team.

The company’s technology also allows organizations to efficiently store and retrieve unstructured data - emails, customer inquiries, multimedia files, and PDFs - the messy yet vital information that represents an organization’s true institutional memory.

When Vast was founded in 2016 by Renen Hallak, its approach was considered bold and unconventional: it relied on flash memory, then seen as too costly for large-scale enterprise use, to build high-performance, scalable storage systems. Vast’s software, which initially shipped with proprietary hardware but now runs on off-the-shelf equipment, dramatically increases the efficiency of flash memory. By compressing and optimizing data storage, Vast reduces costs and energy usage, making flash-based infrastructure viable even at hyperscale. This also lowers the cost of training AI models.

CoreWeave, meanwhile, has become one of Wall Street’s hottest AI infrastructure players. The company, which provides GPU-based cloud computing power using Nvidia chips, is currently valued at $56 billion after soaring nearly 200% since its IPO six months ago.

Both Vast and CoreWeave share a deep connection with Nvidia, the chipmaker is both an investor in Vast and a key supplier to CoreWeave. Vast is currently raising a new funding round, expected to include Nvidia, at a valuation of $25-30 billion, a sharp increase from its previous $9 billion valuation.

The new multi-year CoreWeave contract is expected to significantly boost Vast’s revenue. As of early 2025, the company’s annual recurring revenue stood at roughly $200 million, and it had recently reached positive operating cash flow. Industry estimates suggest that Vast’s annual order rate reached $1 billion in the first quarter of 2025.

Vast employs about 300 people in Israel. While its early growth was driven by enterprises shifting data storage to the cloud, the recent AI boom has dramatically accelerated demand for its products. The company’s recurring revenue model is based on long-term contracts, typically lasting five to seven years, with an exceptionally low customer churn rate due to the deep integration of its software in client systems.