Limerick startup NVMdurance has raised €2,200,000 in a funding round led by US venture capital firm New Venture Partners (NVP), based in New Jersey.

NVMdurance, founded by Joe Sullivan and Conor Ryan, has developed a technology that extends the life of solid state disks by up to ten times. The company is a spin-out from the National Digital Research Centre.

NDRC backed NVMdurance during its research phase and invested €200,000 in the December 2015 funding round, which is much bigger than the centre’s usual investments.

The AIB Startup Accelerator Fund has also joined the party with an investment of €450,000. As is usually the case with this AIB fund, the taxpayer has provided matching investment funding of €450,000 through Enterprise Ireland.

The lead investor in the €2.2m funding round was NVP, which parted with €1.1m.

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NVMdurance chief executive Pearse Coyle (pictured) commented last year: “Having more money behind us will increase our credibility in the eyes of potential big customers. Our experience so far tells us that they want to see cash in the bank.”

Sullivan and Ryan spent around ten years working on the technology behind NVMdurance before being accepted onto the NDRC programme. Coyle, a partner with Corporate Spinouts which carries out commercial assessments of potential clients for investors, joined the firm after being asked by the NDRC for his opinion on NVMdurance’s idea.

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