Public | |
Traded as | : VMEM |
Founded | 2005 |
Headquarters | Santa Clara, California, U.S. |
Key people
|
CEO: Kevin DeNuccio |
Website | www |
Violin Memory is a public American company based in Silicon Valley, California, that designs and manufactures computer data storage products.
The company was founded in 2005 as Violin Technologies by Donpaul Stephens and Jon Bennett in Iselin, New Jersey.Series A financing valued over $10 million was raised in 2010. Two more rounds of financing in 2011 raised an additional $75 million. Corporate investors included Juniper Networks and Toshiba America Electronic Components (TAEC). It was based in Mountain View, California around this time.
Series D financing of $80 million in March 2012 was led by SAP Ventures (arm of SAP AG), and included Highland Capital, GSV and others. The reported valuation was over $800 million.
Violin Memory's initial public offering in September 2013, raised $162 million at a price of $9 a share. Its stock price dropped to $2 a share after its largest partner, Hewlett Packard, became a competitor and due to concerns of how quickly it was spending money. The company experienced losses of $34 million the following year and the board called for the resignation of the CEO. Additionally, five shareholder lawsuits were filed against the company, alleging it did not disclose the financial impact expected from a federal shutdown. In December 2013 the company terminated CEO Basile, replacing him with Kevin DeNuccio in February 2014.
The New York Stock Exchange de-listed Violin Memory shares in October 2016 because its market capitalization had fallen below $15 million. A few days later it changed to be traded on the OTC Markets Group exchange OTCQX, using the same VMEM symbol. In November 2016, it was valued at $3.7 million.
Violin Memory does not use solid state drives (SSD), but instead uses a proprietary design referred to as flash fabric architecture (FFA). The FFA technology consists of: a mesh of NAND flash dies, modules that organize the mesh of flash dies, and a proprietary switched architecture for fault tolerance. In September 2011 Violin announced the 6000 series all-silicon shared flash memory storage arrays.