$20 million in venture funding for NGD Systems’ computational storage drive
Enterprise storage player NGD Systems has reported a $20 million financing round from a collection of investors including an investment firm born of microwave meals, venture firms, and a corporate venture fund.
The money will be used to support and accelerate production and deployment of what the company says is the first nonvolatile memory express, or NVMe, computational storage drive, used in edge environments.
NVMe is a host-controller interface and storage protocol. It speeds data transfer between enterprise and client systems and solid-state drives over a device’s peripheral component interconnect express bus.
Dan Flynn, president of the corporate venture fund Western Digital Capital Global Ltd., one of the investors in the new round (and the offspring of a longtime player in data storage, Western Digital Corp.) said NGD’s drives are built to support the volume, velocity, and diversity of data at the edge.
The storage drive uses NGD’s patented in situ processing to keep artificial intelligence and machine learning tasks within the device that holds the data. Keeping these compute-intensive tasks local in this way — particularly when managing workloads related to massive data sets — eliminates inevitable bottlenecks that occur when data is shuttled to and from CPUs and GPUs.
Investment-management firm MIG Capital LLC led the series-C round. (The Merage family sold their company Chef America, the originator of frozen-food Hot Pockets, and created MIG with the proceeds.)
Orange Digital Ventures, Partech Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV) and Plug and Play Ventures participated in the round along with Western Digital Capital and MIG Capital.
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Article Topics
device edge | NGD Systems | NVMe | SSD | storage | venture funding | Western Digital
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