VAST Data

Founded in 2016 in New York by Renen Hallak, Jeff Denworth and Shachar Fienblit. The pitch was "Universal Storage": a single tier of all-flash that makes expensive high-speed drives unnecessary by pairing cheap QLC NAND with a thin buffer of storage-class memory. The architecture is called DASE, disaggregated shared-everything — compute nodes and storage enclosures scale independently, and every node can see all the data.

The company spent years selling into NFS and S3 workloads, then pivoted hard toward AI training once GPU clusters became the hungriest customer; a partnership with Nvidia and a valuation north of $9 billion followed. Skeptics note that "no capacity fee, just hardware" is as much marketing as architecture.