The 10 Hottest Data Storage Startups Of 2023 (So Far)

These 10 data storage startups are tackling such important customer requirements as decentralized storage, lower-cost data protection, flash storage, components and even technologies such as DNA storage that border on science fiction.

All the talk about macroeconomic headwinds or the potential for a recession mean little when it comes to innovation. This is certainly true in the data storage market, where startups are entering the stage to try to make their mark on this dynamic industry.

Startups often focus their innovation on addressing a specific part of the storage stack, entering the business with new ways to tackle one small part of it, whether that be new software capabilities or new hardware offerings.

These 10 startups named to CRN’s 10 Hottest Data Storage Startups Of 2023 (So Far) are looking to bring a range of new storage capabilities to market and in the process stake their claim to a bigger part of the business going forward.

This includes companies tackling such important customer requirements as decentralized storage, lower-cost data protection, flash storage, components, and even technologies such as DNA storage that border on science fiction.

BackupLabs

Co-Founder, CEO: Rob Stevenson

Headquarters: Bournemouth, Dorset, U.K.

BackupLabs came out of stealth mode in January 2023 with the launch of its secure automated backup technology built specifically for SaaS cloud applications. It was founded by the team behind BackupVault, which has been delivering backup technologies for SMBs since 2004. BackupLabs protects SaaS platform data with automated daily backups, rapid restores with granular recovery, protection against accidental or malicious deletion, 256-bit AES encryption, audit logs and compliance with HIPAA, GDPR and more.

Biomemory

Co-Founder, President: Erfane Arwani

Headquarters: Paris, France

Biomemory is a startup that is focused on DNA data synthesis and storage with the goal of helping reduce the carbon footprint of one of the world’s primary sources of carbon emissions: data centers. The company said its technology will be capable of storage data with a density that is 1 million times that of SSD or magnetic tape using DNA drives assembled from biomass. The data is stored at ambient temperatures with no energy input and no carbon dioxide emission.

Biomemory in November 2022 received a seed round of funding of 5 million euros, or about $5.4 million.

Filswan

Founder: Charles Cao

Headquarters: Toronto

Filswan is the developer of Multichain Storage, a smart-contract-based cross-chain storage gateway integrated with oracle technology aimed at accelerating the mass adoption of decentralized storage by bridging multiple blockchain networks. Oracles are entities used to connect blockchains to external systems to enable smart contracts to decentralize applications. Filswan also offers Filecoin Simple Storage, or FS3, that forms a bridge for migrating large-scale data from Amazon S3 to the Filecoin network, a decentralized network that allows data to be stored in unused capacity.

Filswan in January unveiled the raising of a $3 million round of funding.

Impossible Cloud

Co-Founder, CEO: Kai Wawrzinek

Headquarters: Hamburg, Germany

Impossible Cloud provides a decentralized, enterprise-grade cloud for what it calls fast, outage-proof, Kubernetes-friendly and AWS S3-compatible object storage, and says it can do so in a way to save customers up to 75 percent of the cost of other providers. Impossible Cloud targets storage for big data, backup,and archive use cases and offers seamless integration with other cloud storage technologies as Veeam Software, MSP360 and Amazon Web Services. The company promises no single point of failure and almost no capacity limit and provides built-in data resilience and immutability.

The company in March unveiled a seed funding round of 7 million euros, or about $7.6 million, bringing total funding to date to 10 million euros, or about $10.9 million.

Iodyne

Co-Presidents: Mike Shapiro, Jeff Bonwick

Headquarters: Hamburg, Germany

Website: https://iodyne.com/

Iodyne is the manufacturer of what it terms the world’s fastest Thunderbolt RAID systems. The company’s Pro Data devices feature all-NVME, all-SSD technology combining multiple SSDs and multiple Thunderbolt port pairs in a single package that stores up to 48 TB of capacity and includes RAID-6 and encryption protection. The devices are portable, making their capacity available where necessary. Up to six Pro Data devices can be daisy-chained to each Thunderbolt port on a computer for a total of 1 petabyte of SSD capacity.

Leil Storage

Co-Founder, CEO: Alexander Ragel

Headquarters: Tallinn, Estonia

Website: https://leil.io/

Leil Storage in March 2023 launched its data backup and archiving technologies based on purpose-built hardware while maintaining what it calls “unprecedented” low cost and reduced energy consumption versus its competitors. The company does that via a close relationship with strategic partner Western Digital. Leil Storage has partnered with Western Digital to take advantage of the latter’s new host-managed shingled magnetic recording, or HM-SMR, hard drives and its Power Disable HDD management technology, which Leil Storage said helps reduce energy consumption and cost while improving performance over existing storage systems.

Object First

President: David Bennett

Headquarters: Boston

Object First, a startup developer of purpose-built data protection appliances, in June 2022 exited stealth with $12.5 million in investment and a simple focus on providing a high-performance tier of protection for data managed by Veeam. The tie to Veeam is no accident given that the co-founders of Object First, Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov, were also co-founders of Veeam, and continued to support Veeam after it was acquired in early 2020 by Insight Partners. Object First developed a turnkey hardware appliance based on its proprietary software designed to reside in an end customer’s on-premises environment. However, unlike most typical purpose-built backup appliances, Object First’s appliance is tied specifically to Veeam environments.

Solidigm

Co-CEOs: David Dixon, Kevin Noh

Headquarters: Rancho Cordova, Calif.

Website: https://www.solidigm.com/

Solidigm is both the storage market’s youngest SSD manufacturer and one of its largest. The company was formed at the very end of 2021 when Intel unveiled a two-phase plan 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 $7 billion deal. That deal included the creation of Solidigm, which is now owned by SK Hynix. The company has since introduced three series of data center SSDs as well as four series of client SSDs featuring PCIe 3.0 or PCIE 4.0 interfaces.

Volumez

CEO: Amir Faintuch

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

Website: https://volumez.com/

Volumez develops composable infrastructure software to help developers request storage resources instead of relying on conventional on-premises or cloud storage. It offers a controller orchestration software that harnesses the power of Linux to execute modern data infrastructure workloads using a declarative interface aimed at deploying a wide variety of applications in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The result is a controller-less architecture that composes direct Linux data paths between media and applications to help solve latency and scalability issues and unlock high performance and high resiliency of data for workloads related to large-scale data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning systems across industries.

Volumez in April 2023 unveiled a series A funding round that brought the company $20 million.

Weebit Nano

CEO: Coby Hanoch

Headquarters: Hod Hasharon, Israel

Weebit Nano develops an advanced semiconductor memory technology, Resistive RAM (ReRAM), which it said targets the growing need for significantly higher-performance and lower-power memory solutions in a range of new electronic products such as IoT devices, smartphones, robotics, autonomous vehicles, 5G communications and artificial intelligence. ReRAM helps reduce the cost of semiconductor memory while increasing performance and energy efficiency when compared with existing flash memory technologies, the company said.

Weebit Nano in April 2023 unveiled a $40 million funding round.