NVMdurance announces $2.5 million in Series A funding

Dublin Ireland and San Jose, Calif – March 23, 2016 – Irish technology company, NVMdurance, extending the life of solid state discs, has today announced that it has completed a $2.5 million Series A round of financing. Existing investors New Venture Partners, ACT Venture Capital, Enterprise Ireland and NDRC have invested bringing total funding to $2.77 million.

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.

team shirts“The company was founded because a unique way of significantly improving flash memory endurance had been identified,” said Pearse Coyle, NVMdurance CEO. “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.”

As flash manufacturers continue to pack more bits onto ever smaller storage cells, the endurance (wear-out) issue for NAND flash storage users becomes an ever greater issue. This trade-off between memory cost (per GB) and endurance means that the endurance problem is never really solved – endurance improvements simply reduce the cost of the flash.

NVMdurance software compounds the endurance gain currently being achieved by other means (e.g. ECC or 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 7 times compared to existing NAND flash implementations.”

About NVMdurance
NVMdurance was founded in Ireland in 2013 when the ADAPT project was spun out of the National Digital Research Centre in Ireland. The technology is the result of 13 years’ work on Flash memory endurance by Joe Sullivan and Conor Ryan.

Solid State Disks (SSDs) using non-volatile memory are rapidly taking over from hard disks. However SSDs wear out and this is holding back their complete replacement of hard disks. NVMdurance’ trials with leading manufacturers have proven to significantly extend the life of SSDs. NVMdurance has offices in Limerick, Ireland and San Jose, California. www.nvmdurance.com

About ACT
ACT has been working with founders and management teams to create and build companies for more than 15 years and has invested over €370m in early to expansion stage opportunities. The NVMdurance investment was from the AIB Start-Up Accelerator Fund, which is managed by ACT. www.actventure.com

About NVP
Formed in December 2001, New Venture Partners is a pioneering venture capital investment firm focused on corporate technology spin-outs. New Venture Partners has developed an impeccable track record of successful exit valuations of venture-backed companies. New Venture Partners now has over $650 million under management. www.nvpllc.com

About Enterprise Ireland
Enterprise Ireland is the government organisation responsible for the development and growth of Irish enterprises in world markets. Enterprise Ireland works in partnership with Irish enterprises to help them start, innovate and scale internationally to create jobs and win exports. www.enterprise-ireland.com

About NDRC
NDRC is an early stage investor in innovation, making ventures happen by investing in innovative early-stage ventures, and accelerating the commercial innovation ecosystem. It was recently ranked the no 2 university business accelerator in the world at the prestigious UBI Awards. www.ndrc.ie