Tachyon Nexus Secures $7.5M In Series A Funding From Andreessen Horowitz

As reported in The Wall Street Journal, Tachyon Nexus, the company that aims to commercialize the open source Tachyon in-memory storage system, has raised $7.5M in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz. Tachyon is a memory-centric storage system that epitomizes the contemporary transition away from disk-based storage to in-memory storage. Based on the premise that memory-centric storage is increasingly affordable in comparison with disk-centric storage, Tachyon caches frequently read files in memory to create a “memory-centric, fault-tolerant, distributed storage system” that “enables reliable data sharing at memory-speed across a datacenter” as noted in a blog post by Peter Levine, General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz. Tachyon’s memory-centric storage system improves upon the speed and reliability of file-based storage infrastructures to embrace the requirements of big data applications that require the sharing of massive volumes of data at increasing fast speeds. Tachyon was founded by Haoyuan Li, a U.C. Berkeley doctoral candidate who developed Tachyon at the U.C. Berkeley AMPLab. Tachyon is currently used at over 50 companies and supports Spark and MapReduce as well as data stored in HDFS and NFS formats. Tachyon Nexus, the commercial version of Tachyon, remains in stealth. Meanwhile, Peter Levine joins the board of Tachyon Nexus as a result of the Series A investment to support the development of what Levine envisions “the future of storage” in the form of Tachyon-based storage technology.