After more than seven years in the lab, holographic storage startup InPhase is finally preparing to launch its first products after clinching $20 million in Series D funding.
The round, which has not been officially announced, brings InPhase's total funding to around $95 million. "It's basically for finishing the product, getting it tested, and getting it out to market," says Liz Murphy, the firm's vice president of marketing. "A lot of it is dedicated to buying parts and setting up the manufacturing process."
The exec would not say which firms provided the Series D financing, although she did confirm that InPhase's current investors are involved. A host of firms have already thrown their financial weight behind the holographic storage specialist, including Hitachi-Maxell, Bayer MaterialScience, and venture firms Signal Lake and New Venture Partners.
A subset of optical storage, holographic storage goes beyond the surface recording of traditional disk to lay down data in layers, which is where the technology derives its density advantage. InPhase has already demonstrated densities of as high as 515 gigabits per square inch in its lab, compared to around 20 gigabits per square inch for Blu-Ray disk. The company claims a 50-year lifespan for its technology.
InPhase will begin shipping 300-Gbyte holographic disks with a data transfer rate of 20 Mbytes per second during the summer, according to Murphy.
