Vast Data raises $1B at $30B valuation, becomes Israel's most valuable private tech firm
What's the deal? Israeli-founded AI infrastructure company Vast Data has closed a $1 billion funding round at a $30 billion valuation — the largest private equity raise in Israeli high-tech history.
More than $500 million of the round went not to the company but to early investors and employees selling part of their stakes, at roughly a 15% discount to the headline valuation.
The raise values Vast above every other private Israeli tech firm, putting it just below the $32 billion price Google paid for Wiz — a deal also expected to close this week.
Why now? Vast's timing reflects surging demand for AI data infrastructure. Founded in 2016 by Renen HallakDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Shachar FienblitDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the company pioneered the use of flash memory for large-scale enterprise storage — a bet that seemed expensive at the time but has proved prescient as AI workloads demand faster access to ever-larger datasets.
By 2023, Vast had reached $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). By the end of 2025, estimates put that figure at around $2 billion — a tenfold increase in two years. The company's previous round in 2023 valued it at $9.1 billion, making the new valuation a more than threefold jump.
What could go wrong? The size of the secondary component — over half the round going to insiders rather than the company — may raise eyebrows. It signals that early backers are keen to take money off the table, which can be read as a vote of caution alongside the vote of confidence.
Vast's contracts run five to seven years and its platform is deeply embedded in customers' infrastructure, but that stickiness cuts both ways: winning new large customers takes time, and the company's growth has been heavily tied to a small number of key partners, including CoreWeave and Nvidia.
The signal: Vast's rise reflects a broader truth about the AI boom: the companies selling the picks and shovels — storage, compute, networking — are capturing enormous value alongside the model makers. With an ARR of roughly $2 billion, Vast is no longer a bet on AI infrastructure; it is a core piece of it. The $30 billion valuation is a marker of how critical fast, reliable data access has become as AI systems scale.
Source:
CTech
J.V.
