NVMdurance CEO Pearse Coyle
Irish solid-state storage player NVMdurance has raised €2.23m in a Series A funding round from existing investors New Venture Partners, ACT Venture Capital, Enterprise Ireland and NDRC.
NVMdurance provides software that is proven to make flash memory last longer by extending the intrinsic endurance of the NAND flash.
NAND flash chips are used in many devices, including SSDs, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, GPS devices, USB drives and flash memory cards.
A previous Siliconrepublic.com Start-up of the Week, NVMdurance is led by entrepreneur Pearse Coyle.
“The company was founded because a unique way of significantly improving flash memory endurance had been identified,” said Coyle.
“We now have a number of clients committed to deploying our technology in SSDs and flash arrays, two of which have provided revenue advances alongside this Series A funding round. We will announce these clients during 2016.
“This new funding will help NVMdurance expand its sales and marketing efforts, as well as grow our engineering team.”
The fruits of R&D
The company was founded in 2013 when the ADAPT project was spun out of the NDRC, and is the result of 13 years of work on Flash memory endurance by Joe Sullivan and Conor Ryan.
NVMdurance software compounds the endurance gain currently being achieved by other means like overprovisioning.
The power behind NVMdurance is the use of offline machine learning software that automatically learns the optimal parameter settings for the NAND device.
“The Series A financing builds on an exceptional year from NVMdurance, which saw its first customer announcement – with Altera (now part of Intel)” said Steve Socolof of New Venture Partners LLC.
“The NVMdurance software increases the number of program-erase cycles in Altera’s FPGA-based storage reference design by up to seven times compared to existing NAND flash implementations.”
