HPC and AI storage supplier DDN is seeking fresh investors to better reflect the value it creates.
A paywalled Bloomberg report says DDN co-founder and CEO Alex Bouzari told its interviewer DDN wants to bring in investors who can do this value reflection, and who “see the world through a different lens. The intent is not bringing money into the company because we need it — it’s bringing more savvy, sophisticated, smart people into our circle.”
This view of funding, as a credibility raiser with customers, is similar to that of VAST Data. When it raised $118 million in a 2023 E-round of funding, co-founder Jeff Denworth said: “This funding is simply being used to raise awareness of VAST and our mission … VAST operates its business on a cash-flow positive basis. We’ve managed to build a company which can triple its business annually while not burning through mountains of venture capital.”
Privately-owned, twenty eight year-old DDN does not, it says, need the money to grow its business by developing more SW and HW, hiring more people or opening new offices. It has been operating profitably for more than ten years. Why then does it need to bring more savvy, sophisticated, smart people into its circle who can better reflect its value it delivers to its customers?
The company powered its way to prominence in the supercomputing and HPC world be providing a great mix of fast storage hardware and excellent Lustre-based parallel file system SW. It supported HPC systems using Nvidia GPUs and, as those GPUs became more and more popular for AI large language model (LLM) training and then essential to it, so too did DDN come to play a hugely important role supplying fast file storage to Nvidia GPU servers.
However, when enterprises started adopting AI then enterprise storage suppliers saw the writing on the wall and added Nvidia GPU support as well, which Nvidia appreciated. It saw that its enterprise sales would be helped by having an ecosystem of storage partners, and it provided SW hooks for them to get closer to its GPUs, such as GPU Direct, using NVMe RDMA SSDs, various microservices, and KV caching schemes, culminating in the STX architecture.
This has meant DDN is now competing with more than ten other enterprise storage suppliers for a slice of the enterprise AI storage cake: Cloudian, Dell, Everpure, Hitachi Vantara, HPE, IBM (StorageScale), MinIO, NetApp, Nutanix, VAST Data and WEKA, plus Hammerspace.
DDN has adopted object storage with its Infinia software as that has become popular as an AI data source, and it has recruited execs to up its enterprise sales and product game: Kevin Delane as President and CRO, Chief Product Officer Omer Asad, product management execs Chris Schin and Bhaskar Manickham, CFO /COO Guido Torrini, and Vice Chairman Mohsen Moazami, a non-boardroom role.
The company also gained BlackStone private equity as a $300 million investor in January 2025.
Yet Bouzari now sees a need for strategic investors. Possibly he is seeing four competitors in particular doing well in the high-end/hyperscaler AI storage market, and wants to match them so as not to lose ground.
VAST Data has captured, it says, 80 to 90 percent of the 40 or so of the [ClusterMax-ranked](https://www.clusterm ax.ai/) neo clouds and is a strong competitor for DDN in large customers such as CX/AI and Korea’s SK Group. Everpure has licensed its flash storage technology to a hyperscaler and is talking to several more. Hammerspace has picked up Meta as a customer and is growing fast. WEKA has many neocloud and enterprise customers as well.
DDN was valued at $5 billion 18 months ago, when Blackstone invested its $300 million. It has a small board, consisting of Bouzari, co-founder and Chairman Paul Bloch, CTO Sven Oehm, and Blackstone Senior Managing Director Jasvinder Khaira. This quartet might be looking at VAST Data’s $30 billion valuation, and thinking that DDN’s valuation should be at that level too.
New and strategic investors could confirm it and raise its credibility with high end enterprise customers.