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

Summary

Artificial intelligence services at their heart are massive data plays: you need data — a lot of it — to build the models, and then the models need efficient ways to ingest and output data to work. A company called Hammerspace has built a system to help AI and other organisations tap into data troves with minimal heavy lifting, and it’s been seeing impressive adoption. Now, with customers including NVIDIA, Meta, Tesla, Palantir and the Department of Defense as well as other very recognisable names, Hammerspace is announcing $100 million in funding to expand its business. The funding is being described as a “strategic venture round,” and it values Hammerspace at over $500 million, sources close to the company told TechCrunch. Its backers include Altimeter Capital and ARK Invest, alongside strategic investors that are not being disclosed. The investors are being described as “highly participatory.” The funding is notable because it points to the ecosystem developing around the value that the market sees in AI companies, which are raising billions of dollars both to build their capital-intensive businesses and meet massive demand. But as Jamin Ball, a partner at Altimeter, noted, “You don’t have an AI strategy without a data strategy.” So a company that is building a platform to enable that data strategy can itself become very valuable, too. Hammerspace said much of its growth so far has been through word-of-mouth. It will be using a portion of this funding to expand on that more proactively with sales and marketing. Hammerspace previously raised $56 million from Prosperity7 Ventures (the venture arm of Saudi Aramco), ARK Invest, Pier 88 Hedge Fund, and other unnamed investors. Prior to that, it was self-funded by its CEO and co-founder David Flynn, the pioneer technologist known for his early work on Linux, supercomputers and flash computing. There are a vast number of companies that have set out to plug the big gap that exists in the data market today. “Vast” is an o...