NGD Systems Raises $20 Million in Series C, Total of $45 Million to Date

NGD Systems raised $20 million in series C funding to support and accelerate the production and deployment of its NVMe Computational Storage Drive that continues to enable AI and ML within the device.

MIG Capital LLC leads the latest round with participation from Western Digital Capital and existing investors, including Orange Digital Ventures, Partech Ventures, BGV and Plug-N-Play Ventures.

The infusion of capital allows the start-up to execute its go-to-market strategy, including supporting production as well as sales and marketing efforts. The investment is significant for the company to meet the expanding needs of modern data-intensive industries, especially those managing workloads related to mass data sets and localized analytics, including edge infrastructures. The company’s patented technology performs AI, ML and advanced analytics inside its storage device, eliminating data movement bottlenecks.

“As applications such as AI and ML continue to accelerate the proliferation of edge computing, new storage solutions are needed to address their evolving and dynamic workloads. Leveraging the power of NVMe, NGD Systems’ innovative Computational Storage Drives (CSDs) are purpose-built to support the volume, velocity and variety of data at the edge,” said Dan Flynn, president of Western Digital Capital.

NGD’s approach to Computational Storage processes the data within the storage device – rather than requiring data to travel back and forth to the CPU or GPU for processing – decreasing latency and the amount of data moved. Its patented In-Situ processing technology unites compute and storage in the highest capacity (up to 32TB) and most power-efficient NVMe SSD available in the industry’s standard form factors, reducing network bandwidth requirements to analyze mass data sets.

Computational Storage Drives enable innovations within edge applications where the relationship between compute and storage is particularly critical as this is where data analysis is required, captured and stored. Thanks to NGD, edge platforms will be able to run data analytics, including AI and ML, effectively and efficiently, ensuring only relevant and valuable data is required to be transported and managed at the host CPU, reducing the total time and power while increasing overall performance.

“Pioneering companies like NGD Systems are sending a clear message to the storage industry – there is a better way to handle the petabytes of data that all organizations must contend with to process AI and ML workloads and that is Computational Storage,” said Richard Merage, CEO, MIG Capital.”Two of the most powerful trends in the future are AI and the cloud and we see NGD is aimed at the crosshairs of these growing markets.”

Booking.com is one customer that has seen the benefits of NVMe Computational Storage Drives and is utilizing the drives to enhance the power and performance of its systems.

“Two of our key datacenter metrics are Watts/TB and write-latency. At only 12W of power for a 32TB NVMe SSD, we found the NGD Systems drives to be best in class with respect to this combination of characteristics“, said Peter Bushman, product owner, storage, Booking.com. “The latency, in particular, was consistently low for a device with such a small power draw. With power, not space, being our greatest constraint, and environmental impact a growing concern, this technology holds great promise for use in next-gen datacenter environments.”

“We are excited to have strong partners with the vision to see the value of Computational Storage,” said Nader Salessi, CEO and founder, NGD. “The continuous growth of massive data deployments, especially at the edge, requires low-power and large-capacity storage devices, coupled with the ability to drive more efficient in-place data analytics to take advantage of distributed and parallel processing. NGD is solving issues that no other legacy storage architecture can address.”

NGD also added a new member to its board of directors, Richard Merage, CEO of MIG Capital. Dan Flynn, president of Western Digital Capital, will serve as a board observer.

With this latest round, it has raised $45 million to date.

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