Company Profile: Phison Electronics

Company name:
Phison Electronics

HQ and offices:

• Global Company Headquarters
  Phison Electronics Corp. – No.1, Qun Yi Rd., Jhunan, Miaoli, Taiwan, 350
• US Office
  Phison Technology Inc. – 2860 Zanker Rd #290, San Jose, CA 95134

Website:
Phison

Date founded:
November 2000

Founders:
Khein-Seng (K.S.) Pua, CEO and founder
LinkedIn profile

KS Pua began with humble roots in Sekinchan, Selangor, Malaysia, later moving to Taiwan to attend National Chiao Tung University, where he earned a Master’s degree in Electrical and Control Engineering. KS rose to recognition as a technologist, dedicating his career to innovation in semiconductor and NAND storage technology. At the age of twenty-seven, he founded Phison Electronics Corporation in Taiwan in 2000, along with four other partners. Driven by their determination, Phison debuted with a patented five-in-one card reader, followed by the design and manufacture of the world’s first single-chip USB flash controller, known as the “Pen Drive”. The success of these technologies attracted the attention of key industry players, contributing to Phison Electronics’ steady rise in market leadership. Today, KS is widely regarded as the “father of USB drives”, and Phison Electronics is a $2 billion, cash-generating, debt-free company publicly listed in Taiwan, with approximately 4,800 employees worldwide and over 2,000 patents.

Twenty-five years later, as the founding CEO of Phison Electronics, KS remains a recognized leader in the storage industry and the driving force behind Phison’s first-to-market philosophy that is shaping how data is stored, transferred, accessed, and utilized. Under his leadership, Phison has become the world’s largest independent provider of NAND flash controllers and storage solutions. Phison’s client controllers power many partner SSD solutions, while the company’s Pascari enterprise SSDs and aiDAPTIV+ solution, introduced in 2024, continue to gain traction in emerging data storage and AI training applications. Notably, Pascari storage was recently used in the first data center hardware deployed on the moon during a mission that landed on March 6, 2025, demonstrating the drive’s durability through successful data command, upload, and transfer between Earth and the lunar surface.

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Financial funding:
Phison was founded on $1 Million USD and is now backed by KIOXIA and other key industry players. More information can be found on the investor page.

Employees numbers:
4800+

Revenue:
$1.8B (2024)

Technology:
AI software and storage, Enterprise storage, SSD controllers and ODM solutions.

Products:

• AI
  Phison’s aiDAPTIV+ is the budget-friendly AI training and inferencing solution for on-premises environments.It is powered by Phison patented aiDAPTIVCache flash memory and aiDAPTIVLink memory management middleware. The solution leverages high-capacity flash memory to offload large language model (LLM) memory demands from GPUs, removing AI cost barriers for businesses, governments and educational institutions. By optimizing GPU utilization and enabling data caching on scalable flash, aiDAPTIV+ allows users to avoid costly GPU VRAM deployments by offloading the needed memory capacity to affordable flash memory. aiDAPTIV+ supports comprehensive AI operations including RAG, fine-tuning and inference on-premises with an all-in-one AI toolset delivered in an intuitive no-code graphical user interface.

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• Enterprise
  Phison’s enterprise storage brand, Pascari, is purpose-built for AI/ML workloads, HPC, cloud infrastructure, databases and analytics. Pascari enterprise SSDs solve common storage challenges with flexibility, modularity and seamless integration while offering massive capacities and competitive speeds. Pascari enterprise SSDs offer industry-leading speeds up to (15 GB/s read, 8.7 GB/s write, 3.2 million IOPS) enabled by advanced Phison controllers (e.g., X1 and X2 controllers, respectively).

• Client
  Phison is leading the client SSD evolution with industry-first innovations tailored for today’s most demanding applications – including consumer electronics, high-performance gaming, mobile devices, business computing, and ultra-compact form factors. The platforms are designed with longevity and flexibility in mind, supporting multi-generation NAND compatibility across all major vendors, enabling extended product life cycles and consistent channel availability for our partners.

Phison is the proud innovator behind several industry-first PCIe Gen5 SSD controllers:

• E26 – The world’s first PCIe Gen5 SSD controller, setting the benchmark for next-generation storage performance in gaming and enthusiast platforms.
• E31T – The world’s first PCIe Gen5 DRAMless SSD controller, bringing high efficiency and cutting-edge speed to thin-and-light designs without sacrificing power efficiency.
• E28 – The world’s fastest client SSD controller, delivering unmatched performance for professional content creators, workstation users, and the most performance-sensitive applications.

Phison also engineers robust SATA, NVMe, and bridgeless USB SSD controllers designed with extended lifecycle support, enabling our partners to maintain product consistency and value across evolving markets. From flagship Gen5 performance to energy-efficient DRAMless designs, Phison continues to lead the industry with innovation that empowers the entire client storage ecosystem.

Release and Roadmap:
Phison’s Pascari Enterprise SSD portfolio addresses the growing demand for performance and storage efficiency in AI, hyperscale, and data-intensive applications. The current lineup includes the Pascari X200 series, built for high-performance mixed workloads, and the Pascari D200 and D205V series, designed for extreme density deployments. Notably, the D205V model delivers up to 122.88 TB. The roadmap includes expanded Gen5 NVMe adoption, support for E1.S and additional EDSFF variants, and next-generation NAND integration.

Phison’s aiDAPTIV+ AI solution provides data privacy, affordability and ease of use to AI deployments which fits the needs of small-to-medium businesses, universities and state and local government. It is available on systems ranging from IoT devices to laptop and desktop PCs to servers and storage arrays.  Linux is the current supported environment with the addition of Microsoft Windows support targeted by Q4 2025.  All the latest NVIDIA GPUs are supported with plans to add support for AMD and Intel GPUs and iGPUs.

In Q3 2025, Phison will deliver the ultimate PCIe Gen5 experience for workstations, desktops, and notebooks with the release of the PS5028-E28 controller. The E28 delivers up to 14.9GB/s read performance and industry leading latency. The controller utilizes Phison’s proprietary CoX Processors and built using TSMC’s 5nm process technology to deliver exceptional power efficiency for all day mobile computing. Phison holds various partnerships with key players to provide industry-leading controller technologies that support partner SSDs.

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Pricing model and price:
The Pascari product family is positioned for enterprise buyers seeking performance, density, and long-term value. Pricing is SKU-dependent, with flexible volume discounts available through direct sales and distribution partners. Pricing tiers are competitive with major enterprise SSD vendors and are structured to support a range of procurement models, including hyperscale, OEM, and distribution-led engagements.

GTM:
Phison’s aiDAPTIV+ and Pascari enterprise go-to-market strategy combines global distribution with targeted OEM partnerships and solution-focused co-marketing. Distribution partners such as Ma Labs, ASI, Avnet, and NewEgg are leveraged to reach enterprise and integrator customers, while technical partnerships with server vendors to help showcase real-world deployments. The company supports its GTM approach with webinars, media outreach, product reviews, and a full suite of sales enablement tools tailored to buyer roles across the sales cycle.

Customers:
Initial adoption for the aiDAPTIV+ AI solution and Pascari Enterprise SSDs includes enterprise OEMs, AI infrastructure providers, HPC system builders, and cloud storage integrators. Early deployments focus on end customers implementing AI infrastructure on-premises and modernizing backend storage to support AI training, real-time analytics, and cold tier data storage. The brand is also gaining traction with server vendors and solution builders seeking to differentiate on ease of use, cost-efficiency, density, thermals, or form factor leadership.

Workloads/Use cases/Applications:
The aiDAPTIV+ AI solution and Pascari Enterprise SSDs are designed for the most demanding memory and storage workloads. The X200 series is tuned for applications such as AI and ML training, high-frequency analytics, content delivery, and transactional databases. The D200, D200V and D205V series target hyperscale and archival environments with ultra-high-capacity requirements, supporting object storage, video retention, backup and restore, and bulk data lakes. NVMe performance ensures low latency and sustained throughput across use cases. Client partners address consumer workloads in content creation, photography, gaming and many more use cases that need high-performance storage.

Target market:
The aiDAPTIV+ and Pascari brands are focused on data centers, cloud providers, AI infrastructure builders and verticals such as financial services, healthcare, research, and government. Its combination of customizable firmware, Gen5 readiness, and flexible form factors makes it suitable for a range of AI model sizes and enterprise storage tiers; from small to big LLMs, and hot to cold, primary to archival storage. aiDAPTIV+ and Pascari are designed to meet the requirements of organizations modernizing their infrastructure for AI and cloud-scale data processing.

Competition:
Phison competes and partners with several players on the market being a core contributor to several various products. In terms of others players, with or without Phison components, with potentially a different market presence, among others we can list Dapustor, FADU, Kioxia, Micron, Samsung, Sandisk, Silicon Motion, SK hynix or Swissbit.