flash-storage
(5)
Nimbus Data
Nimbus Data is a privately held, largely self-funded American flash storage company founded in 2003 by Thomas Isakovich. It designs all-flash arrays and solid state drives - most famously the ExaDrive DC100, the 100-terabyte SSD it introduced in 2018 that remained the world's largest for years. Rather than chase venture money, the company built a profitable business selling high-capacity, power-efficient storage to enterprises, cloud providers, and AI and edge workloads, backed by its HALO/AFX software and a flat-rate support model.
Thomas Isakovich
Thomas Isakovich is the founder and CEO of Nimbus Data, the flash-storage company behind the ExaDrive DC100 - the 100-terabyte solid state drive that, years after its 2018 debut, still has no equal in capacity. He built and sold his first storage system as a teenager, launched TrueSAN Networks from his Stanford dorm room, watched it collapse in the dot-com bust at age 26, then started over with Nimbus Data and self-funded more than 90% of its growth into a profitable global business spanning 200 customers in 12 countries. He is a rare bird in Silicon Valley: a hardware founder who turned down the venture-capital playbook, kept the company his own, and went back to finish his Stanford degree purely because he missed thinking.
Hao Zhong
Hao Zhong is the CEO and Co-Founder of ScaleFlux, a San Jose-based fabless semiconductor company that builds computational storage drives and CXL memory solutions for cloud, AI, and data center workloads. With 20+ years in flash storage and LDPC technology — including stints at LSI, SandForce, and Fusion-io — Zhong co-founded ScaleFlux in 2014 to rethink what a storage device can do: compress data in hardware, cut write amplification, and deliver 4x effective capacity at roughly half the price of standard NVMe SSDs. ScaleFlux has raised $288M in funding and posted record-breaking growth in 2024.
ScaleFlux
ScaleFlux designs computational storage drives and CXL memory devices that push compute into the storage layer itself. Founded in 2014 by chip and flash veterans Hao Zhong, Tong Zhang and Yang Liu, the Milpitas company sells NVMe SSDs whose on-drive ASICs handle compression, encryption and data services that used to burn host CPU cycles - giving enterprises more usable capacity, longer flash endurance, and faster database and AI workloads.
George Kurian
George Kurian is the Chief Executive Officer of NetApp, the $20B+ enterprise data storage and cloud infrastructure company, where he has led a decade-long transformation from legacy storage vendor to AI-ready data platform. Born in Pampady, Kerala, he arrived at Princeton at 17 with a partial scholarship and a twin brother — Thomas Kurian, now CEO of Google Cloud — making them one of the rarest pairs in tech: identical twins who both run major Fortune 500 companies. Under his tenure since 2015, NetApp has posted record revenues of $6.57B in FY2025 and positioned itself as critical backbone for enterprise AI workloads.