software-defined-storage
(2)
Gal Naor
Gal Naor is the co-founder and CEO of StorONE, a New York based enterprise storage company built on the idea that software, not more hardware, is the real bottleneck in data storage. He first made his mark in 2004 as co-founder of Storwize, which pioneered real-time enterprise storage compression and was acquired by IBM in 2010 for $140 million. Naor spent roughly six years and dozens of patents building StorONE's unified S1 storage engine, which provisions block, file and object storage from the same commodity drives at a fraction of legacy cost. He is known for a contrarian, efficiency-first philosophy and for steering StorONE to cash-flow positivity with an eye toward an eventual IPO.
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.