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PETAiO Built the Chip. Then It Sold the Drive.
A controller chip is the least glamorous part of a solid-state drive and the part that decides how it behaves. PETAiO made that hidden component its business, then built a family of data-center drives around it.
The Little Controller That Made a Memory Giant Think Bigger
In 2012, SK hynix bought a California controller startup. Its San Jose successor now helps turn dense NAND into enterprise SSDs - including a 245TB drive aimed at AI data centers.
The Memory Chip That Wins by Forgetting
TenaFe made a business from removing a memory chip. The trick is persuading an SSD to travel lighter without letting speed, heat or reliability give the game away.
ATTO Built a 38-Year Business in the Unsexy Gap Between Your Computer and Your Data
The Buffalo-area company does not sell the server or the storage array. It sells the crucial middle - and has spent nearly four decades turning compatibility, predictable throughput and long support cycles into a durable niche.
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.