Hammerspace, an unstructured data wrangler used by Nvidia, Meta and Tesla, raises $100M at $500M+ valuation

Artificial intelligence services in their hearts are huge data games: you need data – much of it – to build the models, and then the models need efficient ways to take and perform data to work.

Called a company Hammerspace Has built a system to help AI and other organizations use data troves with minimal lifting, and it has seen an impressive adoption. Now, with customers Including Nvidia, Meta, Tesla, Palantir and the Ministry of Defense, as well as other very recognizable names, Hamerspace announces $ 100 million in financing to expand its activities.

The financing is described as a “strategic venture round” and Hammerspace appreciates more than $ 500 million, to WAN against the company against the company. The backers include altimeter capital and Ark Invest, in addition to strategic investors who are not announced. The investors are described as ‘very participatory’.

The financing is remarkable because it points to the ecosystem that develops around the value that the market sees in AI companies, which collect billions of dollars, both to build their capital-intensive companies and meet enormous demand.

But as Jamin Ball, a partner at Altimeter, noted: “You don’t have a AI strategy without a data strategy.” So a company that builds a platform to make it possible for the data strategy itself to become very valuable.

Hamerspace said that much of its growth has experienced word of mouth so far. It will use part of this financing to expand more proactively with sales and marketing.

Hamerspace has previously collected $ 56 million from Prosperity7 Ventures (the Venture arm of Saudi Aramco), Ark Invest, Pier 88 Hedge Fund and other investors that are not further mentioned. For that, it was funded by its CEO and co-founder David FlynnThe pioneering technologist who is known for his early work on Linux, Supercomputers and Flash Computing.

There are a large number of companies that are on their way to close the big gap that exists on the data market today. “Great” is an operative word here, because it is one of the companies that competes with Hamerspace, together with Dell, Pure Storage, Weka and many others in the worlds of data orchestation, file management, data pipeline and data management.

That gorge goes something like this: the apps and other digital services that we use to work and do everything else in life now produce many potentially valuable data. But data – Troves exist in silos – they are fragmented, stored over several (competing) clouds and other environments and are often unstructured. That makes them a challenge to use.

This gap applies to a wide range of company use, but perhaps the largest of these is currently AI.

“Ai has been the perfect storm because I needed what I built,” said Flynn in an interview.

Hamerspace is, as we have noticed before, mentioned The concept For the first time came up with cartoons and comics, where characters get objects that they need from nowhere.

This is in fact what Hamerspace does. The startup offers a way to create large amounts of data, regardless of where it lives or how it is used, accessible and available for an organization just when they need it, and to eliminate it when they don’t.

As Flynn describes it, would usually be the way in which companies would have worked with data to be where it is where it should be processed. “You have to install things on every system,” he said. “It’s a mess.”

It is also slow. “The AI ​​weapon race is such a sprint,” he said. With “Time to Value” now an important priority for these companies, Hamerspace reports many customers who are concerned about inactive time.

Flynn’s background in Flash Computing is central in the breakthrough of Hamerspace. Built on Linux, omnipresent in the database world, he could see that the key to organizing data at different locations was to make a file system to do this.

The heart of this is the Linux Kernel NFS client, omnipresent in many of the data systems. Hamerspace’s co-founder and CTO Trond Mylebust Was the main developer of the Linux Kernel NFS client and the startup remains the main manager. The “file system” that the company has built for managing, moving and orchestrating data is based on a certain implementation in Linux that imposes this. What it does, Flynn said, “is unique in the industry.”

Long -term, Flynn said last year That hammerspace can become public in this year. That timeline has now changed, but not the direction. “Yes, IPO is definitely the strategy intended by Hamerspace,” said Flynn. “We are probably still out of two years (depending on the market conditions).”