Artificial intelligence services in your heart are massive data reproductions: you need data, much of them, to build the models, and then the models need efficient ways to ingest and generate data to function.
A company called Hammer He has created a system to help AI and other organizations to take advantage of data stumps with a minimum heavy lifting, and has been seeing an impressive adoption. Now, with customers Including Nvidia, Meta, Tesla, Palantir and the Department of Defense, as well as other very recognizable names, Hammerspace announces $ 100 million in funds to expand their business.
The financing is described as a “strategic company round”, and values the hammer space in more than $ 500 million, sources close to the company said to Techcrunch. Its sponsors include Altimeter Capital and Ark Invest, along with strategic investors that are not being revealed. Investors are being described as “highly participatory.”
The financing is remarkable because it points to the ecosystem that develops around the value that the market sees in AI companies, which are raising billions of dollars to build their capital intensive businesses and meet mass demand.
But as Jamin Ball, an Altimeter partner, said: “You don’t have an AI strategy without a data strategy.” Therefore, a company that is building a platform to enable that data strategy can also become very valuable.
Hammerspace said that much of his growth so far has been mouth to mouth. It will use a part of this financing to expand it more proactively with sales and marketing.
Hammer previously raised $ 56 million De Prosperity7 Ventures (the risk arm of Saudi Aramco), Ark Invest, Pier 88 Hedge Fund and other unidentified investors. Before that, he was self -financed by his CEO and co -founder David Flynnthe pioneer technologist known for his early work in Linux, supercomputers and flash computing.
There are a lot of companies that have proposed to connect the large gap that exists in the data market today. “Vast” is an operational word here, since it is one of the companies that competes with Hammerspace, together with Dell, Pure Storage, Weka and many others in the world of data orchestration, file management, data pipe and data management.
That gap is something like this: the applications and other digital services that we use to work and do everything else in life these days produce many potentially valuable data. But there are data torvers in silos: they are fragmented, stored in multiple clouds (competitors) and other environments, they are often not structured. That makes them a challenge of using.
This gap is applied in a wide range of business use cases, but perhaps the largest of these at this time is AI.
“The AI has been the perfect storm to need what I have built,” Flynn said in an interview.
Hammerspace, as we have noticed before, bears the name The concept First coined from cartoons and comics, where the characters take objects that need from nothing.
This is, in effect, what Hammerspace does. The startup provides a way of making large amounts of data, regardless of where you live or how it is used, accessible and available for an organization just when they need it, and keep them out of the way when they do not.
As Flynn describes it, generally the way companies would have worked with data would be to transfer it from wherever it is where they need to be processed. “You need to install things in each system,” he said. “It’s a disaster.”
It is also slow. “The arms race AI is a sprint,” he said. With “Time to Value” now a key priority for these companies, Hammerspace is registering many clients who are anxious for inactivity time.
Flynn’s background in Flash Computing is essential for Hammerspace advance. Built in Linux, ubiquitous in the world of the database, could see that the key to organizing data in disparate locations was to create a file system to do so.
The heart of this is the NFS client of the Linux nucleus, ubiquitous in many of the data systems. COFUNDADOR AND CTO DE HAMMERSPACE TROND MYKLEBUST He was the main developer of the NFS client of Linux Kernel, and the startup remains his main maintainer. The “file system” that the company has created to manage, move and orchestrate data is based on a particular implementation in Linux that takes advantage of this. What he does, said Flynn, “is unique throughout the industry.”
In the long term, Flynn said last year that the hammer space can be made public as soon as this year. That timeline has changed now, but the address has not done so. “Yes, the OPI is absolutely the planned Hammerspace strategy,” said Flynn. “It is likely that we are still approximately two years (depending on market conditions).”
