Chinese SSD Maker Memblaze Completes Series C Funding

Flash memory maker Beijing Memblaze Technology Co., Ltd. completed its Series C round of financing.

The General Technology Venture Capital Co., Ltd. (GTVC) – managed fund and Qualcomm Incorporated, through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures, contributed tens of millions of US dollars in this round of financing.

“Memblaze has made outstanding achievements in the field of flash storage. GTVC will tap into the powerful resource system of its shareholder, China General Technology, to provide strong support for Memblaze’s vertical industry and business expansion in the global market,” said Bao Jingming, GTVC VP.

Qualcomm’s investment is expected to help Memblaze apply its resources into data centers, and continue to help expand both parties’ efforts in the Chinese enterprise space.

“After this round of financing, we will continue to boost our investments in technology R&D, and attract more outstanding talents to join our company. In the meantime, we’ll invest more in international market development, expand our sales channels, and strengthen our cooperation with international chip, server and solution manufacturers, among other suppliers, to jointly expand the international market,” said Yin Xuebing, Memblaze CEO.

In 2011, Memblaze was co-founded by Yin Xuebing and Lu Xiangfeng. In the Chinese IT field, where many international large-scale factories are present, they are determined to manufacture high quality flash storage products for the China market, and provide efficient and reliable data processing acceleration service for large data centers.

To date, Memblaze has achieved performance and attracted a host of key customers in China, including Internet firms such as Baidu, Qihoo 360 and Tencent, while at the same time setting up offices and business development channels in North America and Europe. In addition, it has built relatively mature distribution systems in Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia.

Innovation has been the driving force of Memblaze’s growth. In addition to the NVMe-supporting PBlaze4 SSD released earlier this year, FlashRAID – a data protection and storage management system developed for NVMe SSD – has also been added to the product roadmap. In the future, Memblaze will place more importance on hardware and software combinations that create stable and reliable datacenter flash storage solutions for customers.