VAST Data Launches into Asia Pacific with Eyes on the Next Wave of AI Innovation
VAST Data, the data infrastructure company for the AI era, has launched its regional headquarters in Singapore to service the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region. This strategic expansion comes about four months after the company secured US$118 million dollars in Series E funding, led by Fidelity Management and Research Company, and saw its valuation triple to US$9.1 billion dollars. At the end of FYQ3, VAST Data surpassed US$1 billion in cumulative software bookings and achieved 3.3X year-over-year growth.
Founded in 2016 and launched in 2019, VAST Data’s accelerated momentum can be attributed to its architecture. The business takes a new approach to marrying unstructured data with structured data by storing, processing and distributing that data from a single, unified system. Their global data infrastructure offering, VAST Data Platform, unifies storage, database and containerised compute engine services in a scalable system that was purpose-built for the future of AI.
Laying the foundation for the next era of AI computing
“Data is the driving force of a digital-first economy,” said Renen Hallak, co-founder and CEO of VAST Data. “Yet, organizations have only been tapping into structured data which amounts to 5% of existing data. The remaining 95% is unstructured data – such as videos, sounds and imagery – that have laid dormant. The VAST Data Platform was built with the entire data spectrum in mind so that natural data generated from all over the world can be analyzed in real-time. Organizations are now able to make data-driven decisions that were once unthinkable.”
While today’s data platforms are used by global enterprises to deploy early AI capabilities such as automating routine tasks, they are not built to meet the needs of deep learning applications such as AI-assisted discovery. VAST Data has broken the longstanding infrastructure trade-offs between performance, cost, capacity, scale, simplicity and resilience that have limited such computing applications to research institutions.
“We’re democratizing access to data for AI and bringing the next era of AI computing in the mainstream. In packaging data storage and compute engine services in a scalable, unified platform, we are laying the foundation for enterprise structures to be AI-ready, so they can simplify and accelerate their machine learning and deep learning initiatives,” adds Hallak.
Singapore as strategic headquarters for Asia Pacific and Japan
VAST Data’s growth over the past year has been fuelled by enterprises ramping up their AI investments, particularly in generative AI. This strategic expansion into Singapore and the APJ region at large well-positions VAST Data to capture the tailwinds of the growing digital economy and its AI boom. Research from Infosys reported that APAC businesses will be tripling their spending on generative AI to US$3.4 billion in 2024.
Further, Singapore is an established regional hub for data centres – 60% of the region’s data centres are located in the city-state, facilitating efficient data transfer between Asia and the rest of the world. Moreover, Singapore is also home to many specialized cloud service providers (CSPs) propping up these data centres. CSPs are known for razor-thin margins and are fielding demands from enterprise, government and research institutions for graphics processing unit (GPU)-powered offerings. The VAST Data Platform is purpose-built to deliver the scale, performance, security and operational efficiency that these CSPs need to build AI-based offerings.
“For AI and deep learning to make a significant impact, it’s crucial to possess not just vast amounts of data, but also data of superior quality, correctly organized and readily accessible when and where it’s needed. The VAST Data Platform provides an AI infrastructure that paves the way for automated exploration, capable of addressing some of the most intricate challenges faced by humanity. From the beginning, we have been collaborating closely with partners to break down technology trade-offs and barriers to build the next-generation AI infrastructure,” said Sunil Chavan, Vice-President, Asia Pacific and Japan, of VAST Data.
One example is VAST’s collaboration with NVIDIA, the world leader in artificial intelligence computing, to design and deploy a new data platform architecture at CoreWeave, a specialized cloud provider. To learn more about VAST’s innovation with CoreWeave, visit vastdata.com/coreweave.
“Singapore, a global tech hub with pro-AI policies, is home to more than 1,000 cloud service providers and over 70 operational data centres. By situating our regional headquarters where our key collaborators are, we seek to work more closely with them, helping their customers transform their data into powerful generative AI applications, and opening the door to AI-assisted discovery,” shared Chavan. With applications across various domains, from finance to healthcare and beyond, the company believes it is uniquely positioned to support and manage data for these industry clouds, and will be hiring local teams to support regional demand.
Digital Travel Platform Agoda, a Booking Holdings company, is VAST’s first key regional client. VAST Data empowers Agoda to manage its data platform cost-effectively, and to equip its workforce to make decisions backed by data that can scale with the business data requirements.
