Mangstor

About Mangstor

Mangstor, Inc. was a developer of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) based flash storage solutions, founded in 2011 in Austin, Texas. The company was co-founded by Trevor Smith, who initially served as CEO, and Ashwin Kamath, who was the chief architect and later CTO. Mangstor aimed to serve the enterprise storage market, focusing on high-demand sectors requiring robust analytics and data-intensive processing capabilities.

The firm successfully raised a total of $26.3 million across four funding rounds, with New Science Ventures as a key institutional investor. Its first funding round was a Series A in July 2013, securing $4 million. This was followed by a $10.2 million Series B round in September 2015 and a final $7.08 million Series B round in August 2017. These investments were intended to fuel growth in leadership, sales, and engineering, as well as to advance product and technology development.

Mangstor's product portfolio was centered around accelerating application workloads in web-scale and enterprise data centers. Key offerings included NVMe over Fabric (NVMf) flash storage arrays and NVMe solid-state devices. One of its notable products was the MX6300, an NVMe-based SSD available in capacities up to 5.4TB, which utilized an innovative offload architecture with a 100-core processor to handle flash management and free up host resources. Another core product was the TITAN software stack, which integrated NVMe SSDs with RDMA Network Interface Cards to deliver rapid application response times and shared storage resources. These solutions were designed to offer significantly lower latency and higher performance compared to traditional iSCSI and Fibre Channel systems. The company's technology earned it the "Best of Flash Memory Summit" award in 2015.

In November 2016, Craig Gilmore took over as President and CEO. By November 2017, signs of a major shift appeared as the company seemed to be rebranding to EXTEN Technologies, with co-founder Ashwin Kamath becoming the CTO and founder of the new entity. Eventually, Mangstor was officially categorized as a deadpooled company.