In a bold affirmation of its growing momentum and market relevance, Hammerspace just announced a $100 million Series B funding round led by Altimeter Capital. The investment marks a pivotal milestone for the company as it accelerates its mission to revolutionize data infrastructure for AI and high-performance computing.

With rapid global expansion, a surge in enterprise adoption, and critical technological differentiators, Hammerspace is positioning itself not just as a player, but as the linchpin in solving the data challenges that AI enterprises face today.

This is not your typical Series B. As David Flynn, co-founder and CEO of Hammerspace, puts it, “This might be a B round, but given where we are in the market and our maturity, it’s more like a C or D round in spirit.”

The capital infusion, he explains, will be directed primarily toward go-to-market expansion, with a sharpened focus on Asia, Europe, and deepening penetration in North America. “We’ve built a tremendous amount of momentum,” Flynn said. “What we need now are the people and resources to execute at scale.”

A Performance-First Data Paradigm

At its core, Hammerspace is redefining what performance means in the context of data infrastructure. The company’s technology—a parallel file system native to Linux that operates with standard NFS protocols—eliminates many of the historic barriers in enterprise storage. But its real secret sauce, Flynn argues, lies in its speed across every stage of deployment and operation.

“To win a race, it’s not just about maximum velocity,” Flynn said. “It’s about how fast you get out of the blocks, how you make the turns. That’s where we excel.” He refers to this approach as optimizing “time to value”—or in AI parlance, “time to first token.” This extends beyond runtime performance to encompass deployment time, orchestration of data across hybrid environments, and the ability to use existing infrastructure without requiring data duplication or downtime.

Where most vendors emphasize storage capacity or proprietary hardware, Hammerspace delivers an abstraction layer that liberates data from infrastructure constraints. “We’re not selling storage,” Flynn clarifies. “We’re VMware for data.”

The Altimeter Investment Thesis

Joining the Zoom to share his perspective was Jamin Ball, partner at Altimeter Capital and the lead investor in the round. A veteran investor in data infrastructure—Altimeter was an early backer of Snowflake, Confluent, and MongoDB—Ball was looking for the next evolution in this space as enterprises scale their AI workloads.

“When we talked to customers, what we heard over and over was that their data was fragmented—across clouds, geographies, storage platforms,” Ball explained. “The move from generalized AI to enterprise-specific AI requires harmonized, high-performance data access. And that was the bottleneck.”

Altimeter’s conviction grew not just from customer feedback, but from intense diligence. Ball recounts independently sourcing a reference from a Meta engineer formerly at Netflix—someone with deep expertise in file systems and data operations. “He validated everything we suspected,” Ball said. “This is the infrastructure unicorn we’ve been waiting for.”

The elegance of Hammerspace’s architecture—an agentless, plug-and-play file system with a single global namespace—seemed “too good to be true” to some observers, Ball admitted. “But when we ran the value prop by both customers and non-customers, the feedback was unanimous: If this works, it’s the Holy Grail. And then when we tested it, we found out—it does.”

Accelerating Global Reach

As Molly Presley, SVP of Global Marketing, explained during the investor announcement, the company’s market expansion has mirrored its technological ambitions. “We closed FY24 with 10x year-over-year growth,” Presley said, “and it wasn’t just the Metas and hyperscalers. We’re seeing broader enterprise adoption, and increasingly, adoption in the cloud.”

Presley described recent expansions into Asia—anchored in Singapore with new operations in China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and India—as just the beginning. Europe is next in line. “We’ve won major awards for both storage and data management innovation,” she added, referencing accolades from the Data Breakthrough Awards, NAB, SiliconANGLE, and TechTarget. “Now we need the talent and the capital to scale this success.”

The funding will help Hammerspace build out its go-to-market teams, deepen channel partnerships, and refine its brand messaging. “Historically, people didn’t know whether to put us in the storage category or data management,” Flynn acknowledged. “We do both. But what unifies it all is performance—performance from the moment of deployment to the final compute node.”

From the Hyperscalers to the Enterprise

The platform’s first wave of adoption came from the frontier of AI model training—hyperscalers and elite research groups building massive foundation models. But Flynn sees a much larger opportunity ahead.

“If the Metas of the world are finding value, imagine what happens when you get to enterprise AI,” he said. “Most corporations don’t have the in-house skills to manage exotic file systems. They need something standards-based, simple, and scalable.”

And simplicity is part of the product’s DNA. Hammerspace is native to Linux, works with standard NFS protocols, and requires no agents—meaning it’s ready out-of-the-box and leverages existing infrastructure. “You don’t have to forklift anything,” Flynn said. “Bring your own storage. We sit on top of it and make it better.”

This model also unlocks the potential of underutilized storage sitting inside GPU nodes. “That’s our Tier Zero capability,” Flynn said. “You can use NVMe drives inside compute nodes as part of the shared namespace. It boosts performance while lowering cost—and customers like Meta have seen up to 16x improvements.”

Infrastructure for the AI Era

According to Ball, one of the defining shifts of the AI era is that data infrastructure is no longer a supporting actor—it’s center stage. “You can’t have an AI strategy without a data strategy,” Ball said. “And the infrastructure to support AI has to be flexible, high-performance, and geographically distributed.”

Hammerspace checks all three boxes. It scales into thousands of storage nodes and tens of thousands of clients. It’s vendor-agnostic and cloud-friendly. And it enables enterprises to avoid costly data copies by orchestrating movement on a per-file basis. “The ability to present a single global namespace, with no downtime, is a game-changer,” Ball noted.

Another key factor in Altimeter’s decision was the public-market readiness of Hammerspace. “We invest with an eye toward the full lifecycle,” Ball explained. “We want to back companies that can go from private to public and beyond.” That orientation makes Altimeter an ideal partner for Flynn, who sees IPO not as a finish line but a starting gate. “We’ve structured this round with investors who can support our trajectory to the public markets,” Flynn said.

The Road Ahead

While Hammerspace has found early success among elite AI builders, the company is preparing for its next stage: democratizing AI infrastructure for the broader enterprise. “Every industry—from banking to biotech, from movie studios to rocket manufacturers—is becoming data-intensive,” Flynn said. “They all face the same issues: data sprawl, performance bottlenecks, and the need for agility.”

The recent $100 million investment is not just about capital. It’s a vote of confidence from one of the most respected firms in technology investing—and a signal that Hammerspace’s hybrid architecture is uniquely suited to the AI era.

“We’re now being invited to the dance,” said Jeff Giannetti, the company’s new CRO. “And based on our capabilities, we’re going to win more than our fair share.”

For Flynn, the message is clear. “This is just the beginning. We’re not just trying to be another storage vendor. We’re redefining how people think about infrastructure itself.”

And in a world where the difference between AI success and failure can hinge on data velocity, orchestration, and simplicity, that redefinition might just be the edge enterprises have been waiting for. King Arthur would be proud!