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Artificial intelligence services at their warmness are massive data play : You need datum — a set of it — to build the modelling , and then the framework need efficient style to take in and output information to work .
A company calledHammerspacehas build up a system to help AI and other organizations tap into information trove with minimal heavy lifting , and it ’s been seeing impressive adoption . Now , withcustomersincluding Meta and the Department of Defense , as well as other very recognizable gens , Hammerspace is announcing $ 100 million in funding to expand its concern .
The funding is being described as a “ strategic venture round , ” and it value Hammerspace at over $ 500 million , sources close to the company told TechCrunch . Its backers admit Altimeter Capital and ARK Invest , alongside strategic investors that are not being disclosed . The investors are being depict as “ extremely participatory . ”
The funding is noteworthy because it points to the ecosystem uprise around the note value that the market place see in AI company , which are raising billions of one dollar bill both to build their capital letter - intensive businesses and meet massive requirement .
But as Jamin Ball , a pardner at Altimeter , observe , “ You do n’t have an AI strategy without a data strategy . ” So a fellowship that is building a program to enable that data scheme can itself become very valuable , too .
Hammerspace said much of its ontogenesis so far has been through word of mouth . It will be using a portion of this funding to expand on that more proactively with sale and marketing .
Hammerspacepreviously raise $ 56 millionfrom Prosperity7 Ventures ( the venture arm of Saudi Aramco ) , ARK Invest , Pier 88 Hedge Fund , and other nameless investors . Prior to that , it was self - fund by its chief executive officer and co - founder David Flynn , the trailblazer technologist know for his other work on Linux , supercomputer , and swank computing .
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There are a vast phone number of companies that have coiffe out to plug the enceinte disruption that exist in the data point market today . “ Vast ” is an operative countersign here , as it is one of the company that competes with Hammerspace , along with Dell , Pure Storage , Weka , and many others in the worlds of information orchestration , file management , data pipeline , and data point management .
That gap goes something like this : The apps and other digital table service we use to sour and do everything else in life these days produce a lot of potentially valuable data . But data troves exist in silos — they ’re fragment , stored across multiple ( competing ) clouds and other environment , and are often amorphous . That makes them a challenge to expend .
This gap applies across a wide range of enterprise purpose cases , but perhaps the prominent of these at the present moment is AI .
“ AI has been the sodding tempest for needing what I have build up , ” Flynn enounce in an consultation .
Hammerspace , as we ’ve noted before , is named afterthe conceptfirst coin from cartoons and comics , where characters draw objects they demand out of fragile air .
This is , in effect , what Hammerspace does . The startup provides a mode of making expectant total of data point , disregardless of where it last or how it is used , approachable and available to an organization just when they need it , and keep it out of the fashion when they do not .
As Flynn discover it , typically the way that enterprise would have lick with data would be to port it from wherever it is to where it needs to be processed . “ You necessitate to install poppycock on every system , ” he said . “ It ’s a mess . ”
It ’s also slow . “ The AI weapons system race is such a dash , ” he aver . With “ meter to time value ” now a key precedence for these companies , Hammerspace is sign up a lot of customers that are anxious about groundless time .
Flynn ’s desktop in flash computing is cardinal to Hammerspace ’s breakthrough . Built on Linux , omnipresent in the database world , he could see that the key to machinate datum across disparate locations was to produce a file scheme to do so .
The heart of this is the Linux kernel NFS client , ubiquitous across many of the data systems . Hammerspace ’s co - founding father and CTO , Trond Myklebust , was the lead developer of the Linux heart NFS node , and the startup remain its lead maintainer . The “ file system of rules ” that the ship’s company has built for manage , moving , and orchestrate data is base on a finical implementation in Linux that taps this . What it does , Flynn said , “ is unequaled across the industry . ”
Longer term , Flynnsaid last yearthat Hammerspace may go public as ahead of time as this twelvemonth . That timeline has changed now but the direction has not . “ Yes , IPO is absolutely the Hammerspace intended strategy , ” Flynn say . “ We in all likelihood are still roughly two years out ( dependant on market weather condition ) . ”
Updated to observe that Nvidia , Palantir and Tesla are not customers of Hammerspace ; they are past investments of Altimeter .
