The 10 Hottest Data Storage Startups Of 2022
Here are 10 data storage startups looking to stand out in a world where traditional storage growth is quickly giving way to the growth in cloud-based storage.
Yet More Data Storage Startups Looking To Make Their Mark
The storage industry has always been characterized by innovation, with storage engineers continually introducing new hardware and software aimed at solving a new storage, data protection, or data management requirement. However, while those storage engineers or developers may be solving one part of a business’ data storage needs, what businesses really need are complete solutions. As a result, storage innovations are often rewarded with either an acquisition offer from a larger vendor looking to bulk up its own complete storage technologies, or seeing its doors close when the developers can’t be heard above the requests for complete solutions.
While painful for individual vendors, either situation is good for the storage industry in general as it frees up resources that can be invested in ever-newer technologies. It can be either a brutal or a rewarding cycle. Best of all, it ensures that storage innovation doesn’t stop, and keeps the doors open to a new cohort of innovators.
Those innovators are facing a changing business. While spending on external storage systems is slowing, spending on cloud-based storage is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24 percent from 2022 to 2029, according to the Enterprise Storage Forum.
Enter this list of 10 hot data storage startups for 2022. These companies were chosen because they have only recently introduced their first storage products or services. Over half of these vendors have cloud at the center of their innovation, with at least two focused on decentralized storage and one on Kubernetes. One offers software-defined storage, but only three offer physical devices.
Storage innovation is also no longer a U.S.-only situation. Of the 10 data storage startups highlighted here, only three are headquartered in the U.S., while six are headquartered overseas and one has dual headquarters in the U.S. and Israel.
CRN highlights some of the hottest storage startups of 2022 in this slideshow:
* iodyne
* Inspeere
* Internxt
* icedrive
* Ionir
* Pliops
* Solidigm
* Speedb
Bundlr Network
CEO and Founder: Josh Benaron
Headquarters: London
Website: https://bundlr.network/
Bundlr Network develops a decentralized storage scaling platform powered by Arweave, a storage platform that backs data with sustainable and perpetual endowments so that users and developers can store data forever. With Bundlr, data can be stored permanently for a one-time fee. To date, the company claimes to have managed nearly 338 million transactions. Data can be uploaded from any major blockchain and paid for with any major token, giving users unlimited capacity that is not under the control of any single entity.
iodyne
Co-presidents: Mike Shapiro and Jeff Bonwick
Headquarters: Mill Valley, Calif.
Website: https://iodyne.com/
iodyne is the startup developer of the Pro Data portable storage device that combines up to 12 high-performance NVMe SSDs, with a total capacity of up to 24 TBs, with the Thunderbolt interface to daisy-chain up to six Pro Datas per host for up to 576 TBs of total capacity. The company has also released a new version with capacity of up to 48 TBs, with a max scalability of 1.7PB. Data protection comes from hardware accelerated RAID-6 and encryption.
Inspeere
President: Michael Ferrec
Headquarters: Poitiers, France
Website: https://www.inspeere.com/
Taking advantage of research done by the I3S Laboratory of France’s Cote d’Azure University, Inspeere developed DATIS, a cloud-based, distributed data protection technology that compresses data, encrypts it with AE-256, and fragments it before dispersing it across multiple storage units the company calls DatisBoxes to help ensure security, continuity, and recovery.
Internxt
CEO and Founder: Fran Villalba Segarra
Headquarters: Valencia, Spain
Website: https://internxt.com/
Cloud storage technology provider Internxt’s Internxt Drive develops technology for syncing, backing up, and sharing of files with an emphasis on privacy. The company provides a user-friendly way to take advantage of military-grade encryption and file sharding to give users complete and sole control over their files and data in Windows, Macintosh, or Linux environments.
icedrive
CEO and Founder: James Bressington
Headquarters: Swansea, U.K.
Website: https://icedrive.net/
icedrive develops cloud storage that feels like a physical hard drive that lets users access, manage, and update their cloud storage as if it was attached to their computer. The storage is available for desktop, mobile, and web users from home users to professionals to do full data protection, share files, and stream audio and video directly from the cloud with the built-in media player.
Ionir
CEO: Jacob Cherian
Headquarters: New York and Tel Aviv, Israel
Website: https://ionir.com/
Ionir, which develops container-native data services for Kubernetes, was founded in 2020 when investors C5 Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners invested $11 million the company formerly known as Reduxio. The company’s technology lets businesses instantly move across clusters or across the planet with all the required services including data protection, performance, persistence, mobility, and deduplication, so that applications can be run wherever and whenever needed.
Nexustorage
CEO and Founder: Glen Olsen
Headquarters: Wellington, New Zealand
Website: https://www.nexustorage.com/
Software-defined storage technology developer Nexustorage has a focus on simplifying data management with Nexfs, its intelligent software for uniting block, file, cloud, and object storage technologies with data protection and automated data lifecycle management. It combines up to three tiers of storage in a scalable single pool of storage, automatically placing data on the most appropriate storage tier. It comes with an optional built-in iSCSI server, and provides NFSv3 and v4 support.
Pliops
CEO and co-founder: Uri Beitler
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
Website: https://pliops.com/
Pliops, a developer of data processors for cloud and enterprise data centers, manufactures the Pliops Extreme Data Processor, or XDR, which aims to improve how data is processed and SSD storage is managed. XDP manages data flow from application to storage, eliminating bottlenecks and latency that can cost time and resources, and in the process increase the power efficiency of storage. Pliops in August unveiled the closing of a new $100-million funding round that brings total funding in the company to over $200 million.
Solidigm
Interim CEO and co-CEO of SK hynix: Noh-Jung Kwak
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
Website: https://www.solidigm.com/
Solidigm is arguably the biggest storage startup in history. It was formed on Dec. 29, 2021 when Intel decided to sell its SSD business and certain NAND SSD-associated intellectual properties, as well as its Dalian, China-based NAND memory manufacturing facility, to South Korea-based semiconductor manufacturer SK Hynix, in a deal worth $7 billion, creating a new company called Solidigm. Solidigm this year has introduced a number of PCIe 4.0 SSD, and in August introduced what it calls the world first penta-level cell SSD which stores five bits of data per memory cell.
Speedb
CEO and Co-founder: Adi Gelvan
Headquarters: Tel Aviv, Israel
Website: https://www.speedb.io/
Speedb is developer of the Speedb Data Engine, a drop-in replacement for the open source RocksDB embedded storage engine which is a popular embeddable persistent key-value store for fast storage used for massive databases. The technology supports petabyte-scale datasets and billions of objects while maintaining high performance even on low-cost hardware. It is available via open source or an enterprise-supported product.