$800,000 Funding Round for NVMdurance After $300,000 Last Year

Irish technology company NVMdurance, extending the life of SSDs more than twentyfold, has announced greater NAND flash endurance gains and additional investment. 

Existing investors New Venture Partners LLC and NDRC, have been joined by ACT Venture Capital and Enterprise Ireland in an $800,000 funding round.

A year after winning Most Innovative Technology at Flash Memory Summit 2013, NVMdurance has disclosed that it has applied its technology to the latest small-geometry flash memory.
 
NVMdurance software is now proven to make SSDs last more than 20 times longer by extending the endurance of the flash memory on 1x nm chips.

As flash manufacturers continue to pack more bits onto ever smaller storage cells, the endurance (wear-out) issue for NAND flash storage users becomes a greater issue. This trade-off between memory cost (per gigabyte) and endurance means that the endurance problem is never really solved – endurance improvements simply reduce the cost of the flash.
 
At Flash Summit 2013 NVMdurance demonstrated on 3x nm NAND flash that it could achieve a tenfold endurance gain by optimising parameter values alone.

Now NVMdurance has proven that the gain from the use of various other techniques (e.g. powerful ECC) is multiplicative of the gain from NVMdurance’ software and so it is now at least a twentyfold gain – even on the latest generation of devices.
 
“We are very excited by the progress that NVMdurance has made and are delighted to be following our money in this latest round of funding,” said Steve Socolof, New Venture Partners. “NAND flash is the fastest-growing product in the history of the semiconductor market. The market in 2014 is expected to be over $28 billion.”

NVMdurance receives additional investment from existing and new investors
 
“This investment will support the commercial roll-out of our technology,” said Pearse Coyle, NVMdurance CEO. “Using NVMdurance software, the life of the flash is extended by at least 20 times with no impact on manufacturing process or architecture. The endurance improvements we have recently achieved have put us at the head of the pack globally and we are very pleased with the deployments we are now working on.“

NVMdurance was founded in Ireland in 2013 when the ADAPT research group and the test equipment maker Evolvability Ltd were brought together at the National Digital Research Centre in Ireland. The technology is the result of 14 years’ foundry work on flash memory endurance optimization by the founding team.
 
The endurance (wear-out) issue is a major factor retarding the capacity growth of the $28 billion flash industry that is growing at 13% per annum.

NVMdurance has offices in Limerick, Ireland and San Jose, CA.