nvme
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ForwardEdge ASIC
ForwardEdge ASIC is a Saint Paul, Minnesota-based integrated circuit design house and wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin. It designs 100% domestically traceable custom ASICs and FPGAs - plus silicon IP and turnkey products - for defense, aerospace, space, cybersecurity, and commercial customers. Built by a team of veteran engineers who have worked together for more than 30 years, the company pairs startup speed with Fortune 100 stability and holds DMEA Trusted IC vendor status, positioning it as a secure onshore alternative for mission-critical microelectronics.
PlanetScale
PlanetScale is a San Francisco database company that turns the hard parts of running relational databases at scale into a managed cloud service. Founded in 2018 by the creators of Vitess - the MySQL-sharding system built at YouTube and later used by Slack, GitHub and Square - the company sells a serverless database platform known for non-blocking schema changes, branching workflows borrowed from Git, and, more recently, Metal instances built on locally-attached NVMe drives. In 2025 it extended the same platform to Postgres, chasing the fastest-growing part of the database market while still, in its own words, loving MySQL.
Quobyte
Quobyte is a software company that turns commodity x86 or ARM servers into a unified, high-performance, software-defined storage system spanning file, block, and object interfaces. Founded in 2013 by two ex-Google engineers who previously built the open-source XtreemFS parallel file system, Quobyte applies hyperscaler design principles - resilient software rather than exotic hardware - to enterprise, HPC, and AI storage. Its Data Center File System combines NVMe and HDD tiers in one architecture and is used by organizations including Siemens Healthineers, robotaxi maker Zoox, the UK's STFC/JASMIN supercomputer, and Yahoo Japan.
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.
Kam Eshghi
Kam Eshghi is Chief Business Officer at OpenInfer, the Inference OS for the agentic era. He co-founded Lightbits Labs, where he helped pioneer NVMe/TCP storage and drove its adoption across data centers and AI clouds before the company was acquired by NVIDIA. Earlier in his career he led strategic alliances at DSSD (acquired by EMC for $1B), built the NVMe controller business at IDT, and shaped server chipset and Ethernet switch roadmaps at Intel. MIT EECS and Berkeley Haas MBA. Forbes Technology Council member.
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.
Frank Ferrante
Frank Ferrante is the CEO of ForwardEdge ASIC, a Lockheed Martin subsidiary dedicated to advancing U.S. domestic semiconductor chip design. A 30-year veteran of the semiconductor industry, Ferrante has held leadership roles at Intel (Senior Director of Military, Aerospace and Government), Wolfspeed (VP of Worldwide Automotive Sales and Marketing), and Altera. He is a vocal advocate for U.S. advanced manufacturing policy, having advised policymakers on the CHIPS Act, SHIP, and RAMP-C initiatives. Under his leadership, ForwardEdge ASIC achieved U.S. Government Trusted IC Vendor Status in February 2026 and selected the MIPS S8200 for mission-critical autonomous platform ASICs.
Leander Yu
Leander Yu is the founder and CEO of Graid Technology Inc., a Sunnyvale-based startup that invented the world's first GPU-accelerated RAID solution for NVMe SSDs - SupremeRAID. With over 25 years in the storage industry and a prior successful exit (Bigtera to Silicon Motion in 2017), Yu built Graid in 2019 to solve a fundamental bottleneck: traditional RAID controllers can't keep up with modern NVMe speeds. By offloading RAID computation to a GPU, SupremeRAID delivers up to 28 million IOPS and 260GB/s throughput from a single card. The company raised a $30M Series B in March 2025 led by Foxconn and CTBC joint venture, and signed a landmark licensing deal with Intel for VROC technology in late 2025.