The company’s technology extends the life of solid state flash storage disks by more than 20 times by extending the endurance of the flash memory on 1x nm chips.

NVMdurance, a spin-out company from the NDRC, last year raised seed funding of €250,000 from New Venture Partners. Earlier this week, we reported the company succeeded in raising a further US$800,000 from original investors New Venture Partners, the NDRC, and new investors ACT Venture Capital and Enterprise Ireland.

“NVMdurance is about non-volatile memory endurance,” said CEO Pearse Coyle. “Flash memory is becoming the dominant medium for non-volatile storage, ie, the stuff that keeps your data when you switch off the computer, but after a certain number of reads and writes flash memory simply wears out.

“This so-called ‘endurance’ problem dogs the flash memory business and is retarding its growth, particularly its efforts to have solid state disks (SSDs) fully replace hard disk drives (HDDs).

“We make flash memory last at least 20 times longer – longer than anyone else in the world can.”

The market

What is fascinating about NVMdurance is the fact it is a young Irish company targeting the whole US$28bn flash memory industry, starting immediately with the manufacturers of SSDs.

“These markets are growing at 20pc and 40pc per annum respectively and are crying out for good solutions to the endurance problem, particularly because the six flash fabricators are making flash denser and cheaper per gigabyte (GB) and as they do its endurance further deteriorates.

The founders

Anyone who has been watching the genesis of the Irish start-up scene over the last decade would be familiar with Coyle.

He has been the lead commercial guy in several successful Irish tech ventures, including Eurologic, which gave him his grounding in data storage.

“I’ve also founded two less successful start-ups of my own. In recent years, through the venture CorporateSpinouts.com, I’ve been focused on commercialising spin-outs from research labs and that’s how I met Conor Ryan and Joe Sullivan, the inventors of this technology.

“This one was too good to just spin-out from the NDRC so I took the CEO role, at least until we do the next funding round.”