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 M in Series E funding, which saw its valuation triple to US$9.1 B.
VAST Data’s global data infrastructure offering, VAST Data Platform, unifies storage, database and containerised compute engine services in a scalable system that was purpose-built for AI.
“Data is the driving force of a digital-first economy,” said Renen Hallak, co-founder and CEO of VAST Data.
“Yet, organisations 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 analysed in real-time. Organisations are now able to make data-driven decisions that were once unthinkable.”
According to VAST Data, today’s data platforms are used by global enterprises to deploy early AI capabilities such as automating routine tasks, but are not built to meet the needs of deep learning applications such as AI-assisted discovery. The company said it has broken the infrastructure trade-offs between performance, cost, capacity, scale, simplicity and resilience that have limited such computing applications.
“We’re democratising 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,” said Hallak.
VAST Data’s choice of Singapore for headquarters comes down to the expected demand for AI in APJ, as well as the country's position as an established regional hub for data centres – 60% of the region’s data centres are located in the city-state. Moreover, Singapore is also home to many specialised cloud service providers (CSPs) that support 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.
“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 Sunil Chavan, VP, Asia Pacific and Japan, of VAST Data.
"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."
“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 organised 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,” Chavan elaborated.
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.
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