The 10 Hottest Data Storage Startups Of 2022 (So Far)
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.
Another Year, Another Crop Of Data Storage Startups
See the latest entry: The 10 Hottest Data Storage Startups Of 2022
Storage vendors live in an interesting world. There are so many innovators coming up with great ideas to solve a key customer problem. However, the reality is, customers want a complete solution, and so many of those startups find they are more likely to either be acquired or whither on the vine than they are to succeed as a stand-alone company. That doesn’t stop the innovation, however, as the storage industry seems to attract more than its fair share of innovators.
Those innovators are facing a changing business. While spending on external storage systems has slowed to a mere 2 percent year-over-year by the first quarter of 2022, according to IDC, the cloud storage market is expected to maintain a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24 percent from 2022 to 2029, according to the Enterprise Storage Forum.
Enter CRN’s list of 10 hot data storage startups so far in 2022. These companies were chosen because they have only recently introduced their first storage products or services. Three are from the hot flash storage market, but the majority are looking to make their marks in the similarly hot cloud storage market.
Interestingly enough, just looking at this list could give the impression that storage startups are not as tied to a U.S. foundation as they used to be. While Israel has always been a hotspot for storage startups, only three of the 10 startups featured here are based in the U.S. Two are in Israel, while the others are in various European countries.
One other note about this crop of startups. Of the 10 listed here, five of them have company names that start with the letter “i.” While this is likely mere coincidence, perhaps the letter “i” that was made so popular with the iPod, iPad, and iPhone is making a comeback.
Will all these companies survive long enough to make their mark on the storage industry? Time will tell. But for now they have good stories to tell. And CRN is there to help tell them.
* iodyne
* Inspeere
* Internxt
* icedrive
* Ionir
* Nexustorage
* Solidigm
* Speedb
* Storadera
* TenaFe
iodyne
President and Co-founder: 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. Data protection comes from RAID-6 and the iodyne Cloud.
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 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 share 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 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 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.
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.
Solidigm
CEO: Robert Crooke
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.
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.
Storadera
CEO: Tommi Kannisto
Headquarters: Tallinn, Estonia
Website: https://storadera.com/
The Storadera Space service from Storadera was designed to offer a Europe-based storage cloud to compete with the likes of AWS and other hyperscalers with an Amazon S3-compatible offering. The service, which costs 6 euros per terabyte per month, integrates with data protection offerings including MSP360 Explorer Freeware, Synology Hyper Backup, and Veeam Backup and Replication.
TenaFe
CEO and Co-founder: Mike Lee
Headquarters: Campbell, Calif.
Website: https://www.tenafe.com/
TenaFe develops SSD controllers for data storage solutions in client, data center, and emerging edge applications. The company’s first product, the TC2200, is a PCIe Gen4 NVMe DRAM-less SSD controller with the company’s proprietary FlexLDPC technology, an LDPC (low-density parity check) error correction engine supporting high latency and high endurance in TLC and QLC NAND flash SSDs.