Portable vs VAST Data
Side-by-side comparison of AI visibility scores, market position, and capabilities
Minneapolis MN long-tail data connector platform building connectors for niche and legacy SaaS sources that Fivetran and Airbyte do not prioritize; bootstrapped and profitable;
About
Portable is a data connector platform founded in 2021 and headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The company was built to solve the long-tail connector problem in the modern data stack: while Fivetran, Airbyte, and similar platforms maintain connectors for the most popular 50-200 SaaS applications, there are thousands of niche, industry-specific, and legacy systems that data teams need to connect to their warehouses but for which no maintained connector exists. Portable builds and maintains these long-tail connectors on a managed, service model basis.\n\nPortable is bootstrapped and has not raised external funding, operating as a profitable, lean business focused on a specific under-served niche. Its connector catalog covers hundreds of niche SaaS applications in verticals including legal, healthcare, construction, hospitality, manufacturing, and specialized marketing platforms that have large enterprise customer bases but are too small or too legacy for the major connector platforms to prioritize. Portable's team builds custom connectors on request with turnaround times measured in days, not weeks, and maintains them as managed services.\n\nPortable integrates with major data warehouses including Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and Databricks as destinations and positions itself as a complement to Fivetran rather than a replacement — customers use Portable for the 20% of their data sources that Fivetran does not cover, while continuing to use Fivetran for the mainstream connectors. This positioning in the gaps of the broader connector ecosystem has allowed Portable to build a sticky customer base among data teams at mid-enterprise companies with diverse and unusual data source footprints.
Closed a $1 billion Series F at a $30 billion valuation in April 2026, backed by NVIDIA and Fidelity, after surpassing $500M in committed ARR with its AI Operating System platform.
About
VAST Data builds the AI Operating System — a unified platform combining all-flash storage (DataStore), an AI-native database (DataBase), and a globally distributed namespace (DataSpace) into a single infrastructure stack. The platform is purpose-built for organizations training, running, and managing AI models and agents at scale. In 2026, VAST launched AgentEngine, a production-grade deployment layer for multi-agent AI stacks with full auditability and MCP integration.
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