SandForce Wins $25 Million in Funding

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Heres some great news out of Silicon Valley. SandForce is going to receive $25 million in venture capital funding. I cant wait for better/cheaper SSDs.


By Frank Michael Russell
Posted: 09/14/2010 02:12:00 PM PDT

Chip developer SandForce has received $25 million in venture capital in a round led by Menlo Park-based Canaan Partners, the Saratoga company announced Tuesday.

The round also includes funding from previous investors DCM, Storm Ventures, Translink Capital, UMC Capital and Milpitas chip maker LSI.

"This new funding will help us bring our next-generation products to market, expand our customer and partner support infrastructure, and accelerate our core technology development that will extend our market leadership," CEO Michael Raam said in a news release.

SandForce makes processors that control the use of flash memory in data storage devices -- putting data on solid-state drives, or SSDs, rather than hard-disk drives. According to a company fact sheet, SandForce was founded in 2006 and has 90 employees.

"SandForce has breakthrough SSD processor technology and has executed extremely well on its business plan," Eric Young, a general partner at Canaan Partners who was named to the startup's board of directors, said in the news release.

According to TechCrunch, SandForce received $21 million in previous funding.
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http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_16074073
 
This is actually good news. More R&D means better competing products. And usually better competition also means better value for money.
 
Sandforce may have executed well on their business plan, but that plan must be terrible if they are needing to raise more money now. Drives with their controllers have been selling well for several months. If they cannot make enough money to support ongoing development with sales this good, then the business plan must have been bad.
 
john4200 said:
Sandforce may have executed well on their business plan, but that plan must be terrible if they are needing to raise more money now. Drives with their controllers have been selling well for several months. If they cannot make enough money to support ongoing development with sales this good, then the business plan must have been bad.
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Not necessarily. Maybe they are just expanding beyond their current capabilities. We have no idea what that money will be used for.
 
They are tearing it up for a new company. If it lights a fire under Intel's ass them I'm all for it. Intel is the one who has the money and means to do the big stuff....they just need a stiff kick in the nuts sometimes to get them going.
 
+1. these guys are making the unbelievable happen, and companies get lazy if these upstarts do not come and shake the bushes every once and awhile.
 
john4200 said:
Sandforce may have executed well on their business plan, but that plan must be terrible if they are needing to raise more money now. Drives with their controllers have been selling well for several months. If they cannot make enough money to support ongoing development with sales this good, then the business plan must have been bad.
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It is highly likely that their previous success is the only reason they got this funding! Given the realities of hardware design, they've been pretty frugal with the funding they previously had and have likely exhausted most of it. I have no idea if their current product line is actually custom ASIC based or FPGA based but it is almost assured that their next gen chips will be custom ASICs based on their job openings. The basic NRE costs for getting an ASIC out the door are fairly high and they likely needed this funding in order to have enough cash to get the next gen products out the door. A single mask set/tapeout can run easily into the millions, fyi.
 
westrock2000 said:
If it lights a fire under Intel's ass them I'm all for it. Intel is the one who has the money and means to do the big stuff....they just need a stiff kick in the nuts sometimes to get them going.
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Or Intel might just decide to buy SandForce. Competition is the better scenario, imo.
 
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