The artificial intelligence services in their minds need data to build models. That requires a lot of data. Models require efficient methods to ingest and output data.
The company HammerSpace has built a system that allows AI and other organizations to use data trobes with minimal heavy lifting, and has seen impressive adoption. Currently, Hammerspace, which includes customers such as Nvidia, Meta, Tesla, Palantir, and other highly recognizable names, is unveiling $100 million in funding to expand its business.
The funding is known as a “strategic venture round,” and it values more than $500 million in hammer space, a source close to the company told TechCrunch. Its supporters include Altimeter Capital and Ark Invest, and strategic investors who have not been disclosed. Investors are said to be “very participatory.”
This funding is noteworthy as it refers to an ecosystem that develops around the value the market sees in AI companies that build capital-intensive businesses and raise billions of dollars to meet large demand.
However, as Altimeter partner Jamin Ball said, “There is no AI strategy without a data strategy.” That’s why companies are building platforms to enable the data strategy itself to be extremely valuable.
Hammerspace said so far, much of its growth has been through word of mouth. Use some of this funds to expand it more aggressively in sales and marketing.
Hammerspace previously raised $56 million from Prosperity7 Ventures (Saudi Aramco venture arm), Ark Invest, Pier 88 Hedge Fund and other unnamed investors. Prior to that, it was self-funded by CEO and co-founder David Flynn, a pioneer technologist known for his early work on Linux, SuperComputers and Flash Computing.
There are a huge number of companies established to close the huge gaps in today’s data market. “Vast” is the term “Vast” here because it is one of the companies that compete with Dell, Pure Storage, Weka, and many others in the world of data orchestration, file management, data pipelines and data management.
The gap is as follows: These days, the apps and other digital services we use to work and do everything else produce a lot of potentially valuable data. However, data problems exist in silos – they are fragmented, stored in multiple (competing) clouds and other environments, and are often unstructured. It challenges them to use.
This gap applies to a wide range of corporate use cases, but perhaps the biggest of these at the moment is AI.
“AI was the perfect storm for me to need what I built,” Flynn said in an interview.
As we pointed out earlier, HammerSpace is named after the concept originally created from comics and comics. The character pulls out the objects he needs from the thin air.
This is actually what Hammerspace does. Startups provide a way to create a large amount of data so that it can be made available to organizations when they need it, and not get in the way when they aren’t.
As Flynn explains, the way companies usually used data to collaborate is porting them wherever they need to be processed. “You have to install things on every system,” he said. “That’s a mess.”
It’s late again. “AI Arms Race is a very sprint,” he said. With “Time To Value,” which has become an important priority for these companies, HammerSpace has signed up many customers who are worried about idle times.
Flynn’s background in flash computing is central to the breakthrough of hammer space. Built on ubiquitous Linux in the database world, he found that the key to organizing data in different places is to create a file system to do so.
At the heart of this is the Linux kernel NFS client, which is ubiquitous across many data systems. Hammerspace co-founder and CTO Trond Myklebust is the lead developer of Linux Kernel NFS clients, and the startup remains its lead maintainer. The “filesystem” that the company built for managing, moving, and reconciliation of data is based on a specific implementation of Linux. Flynn said “it’s unique across the industry.”
In the long run, Flynn said last year that Hammer Space could be released as soon as this year. That timeline has now been changed, but the direction remains the same. “Yes, the IPO is definitely a Hammerspace-intended strategy,” Flynn said. “We’re still in about two years (depending on the market situation).”