Editing by Kate Yuan

The Beijing-based Starblaze Technology (北京忆芯) has shown doubled sales performance in the enterprise SSD market in 2021 over the previous year, winning “The Best Company of the Year in Market Breakthrough Award” from China Semiconductor Investment Alliance (CSIA) and JW Insights last December.

Shen Fei, Starblaze’s CEO, told JW Insights that his company has grown into a leading supplier of high-end PCIe SSD controller chips and finished disks in China after nearly six years of development. He thanked the support of the favorable national policies in the country.

A graduate of Shanghai’s Fudan University, Shen had a short stint with a startup design house in the U.S. Silicon Valley and returned to China to pursue his entrepreneurial dream. He launched the company in 2015 with a strong team of extensive experience and as an early domestic player in the high-performance SSD controller market.

Starblaze’s self-developed enterprise SSDs solution - STAR1200E with STAR1000P controller chip - has been widely used in organizations and companies with big data processing needs, including those in government, education, finance, electric power, transportation, customs, telecommunications, radio, and television.

Starblaze also launched the consumer SSD solution STAR1200L last year, which is the company’s first cost-effective consumer solution with DRAM-Less architecture. It can be applied to major PCs and thin and light notebook markets, allowing more users with NVMe’s fast speed.

Investors have been impressed with Starblaze’s rapid development: In the fourth quarter of 2021, the company completed the B round of financing of RMB500 million ($78.6 billion) from both former and new shareholders.

Starblaze has self-developed the DeepSSD® series of smart storage accelerator cards and edge computing hardware. The solutions have been implemented in power and energy IoT systems, comprehensive urban management, and security and safety supervision.

Shen Fei added, “We will soon launch a new generation of high-end enterprise SSD controller chip STAR2000. We have also begun pre-research work on the next-generation PCIe Gen5 SSD controller chip, which will further consolidate our leading position in consumer-level and enterprise products,”

Starblaze now has R&D offices in Shanghai, Chengdu, Shenzhen, Xiamen, and Hefei. Shen said that Starblaze would strive to be not only a leader in China but will also develop in the global market to enable big data applications.