Who are VAST Data's decision-makers?

Renen Hallak co-founded VAST after serving as Head of R&D at XtremIO, the Israeli all-flash storage startup acquired by EMC for approximately $430 million in 2012. His co-founders Alon Horev and Shachar Fienblit also came from XtremIO and Kaminario respectively — meaning the founding team had already built and scaled enterprise storage hardware once before, and understood precisely which architectural corners had been cut by first-generation all-flash arrays. Jeff Denworth, the fourth co-founder, brought marketing and product expertise from CTERA Networks, a cloud-NAS company.

This founder-led, engineering-heavy DNA persists a decade in. Hallak is the public face at NVIDIA GTC events and major customer briefings; Horev and Fienblit are deeply embedded in product roadmap and R&D hiring from Tel Aviv and Haifa; Denworth acts as de facto chief evangelist and primary product voice externally. All four remain active and operator-role holders, not advisory titles — a fact investors consistently cite as central to VAST's product velocity and culture.

The C-suite hired since 2022 reflects IPO preparation: Amy Shapero (CFO, August 2024) from Shopify where she scaled revenue from $700M to $6B; Marianne Budnik (CMO, 2023) from CrowdStrike, CyberArk, and nearly a decade at EMC; and Rick Scurfield (CRO, 2024), a veteran enterprise technology sales executive. This combination of founder-operator depth and experienced public-company executives is the organizational profile of a company readying for a public offering.

VAST's buying committee for major enterprise software and infrastructure purchases is small and centralized by design — a reflection of its founder-led culture. Amy Shapero (CFO) owns financial systems, ERP, accounting tools, and audit-related procurement. Rick Scurfield (CRO) and his sales operations team govern CRM, sales intelligence, and revenue tooling. Marianne Budnik (CMO) controls marketing automation, demand-generation platforms, and ABM tools. Engineering leadership — CTO Alon Horev and CRDO Shachar Fienblit — governs developer tooling, cloud infrastructure, observability, and security platforms from Tel Aviv.

For operational vendors covering HR platforms, collaboration tools, and facilities, VP of Global Operations (Stacey Cast per available org data) is the key contact for day-to-day procurement. For any platform commitment exceeding $500K in annual contract value, CEO Hallak and CFO Shapero are almost certainly in the approval chain. VAST's culture is strongly technical and deeply skeptical of vendor claims: expect a proof-of-concept requirement driven by engineering leadership before any major deal reaches the finance team, and ensure your technical champions in Tel Aviv are aligned before a New York commercial conversation.

VAST is organized around functional leadership reporting to CEO Renen Hallak: Engineering (Horev), R&D (Fienblit), Sales (Scurfield), Marketing (Budnik), Finance (Shapero), and a field CTO function (Andy Pernsteiner, bridging product and customer success). The Israel R&D center — split between Tel Aviv headquarters on Rokach Boulevard and a newer Haifa office — houses the majority of core engineers and architects; New York HQ hosts corporate functions and the GTM executive team. Field sales and solutions engineering are distributed across North America, EMEA (UK, Germany, Nordics), and APAC (Japan, Australia, Singapore).

With approximately 1,150 employees and a fresh $1 billion Series F in April 2026, VAST is in active scaling mode with over 100 open positions as of mid-2026. Headcount grew 26% year-over-year in 2025, following 25% growth in 2024 and 34% growth in 2023. The fastest-growing functions are field sales, partner solutions engineering, and customer success — areas directly supporting the CoreWeave and Azure partnership expansions. This growth creates sustained and significant demand for enterprise SaaS across HR, IT security, finance, and GTM tooling stacks.