Founders: John Hayes, John Colgrove
Date launched: 2009
Funding: $470 million
Industries disrupted: Cloud services, data storage, software
Data storage is certainly not the sexiest market, but Pure Storage has managed to bring some heat. The Mountain View, California-based company uses flash technology rather than traditional hard drives to enable companies to store vast databases and business records. Corporate data storage is a $24-billion-a-year industry.
Read MoreFULL LIST: 2015 DISRUPTOR 50
Pure's CEO Scott Dietzen says flash memory beats disk on every front: speed, reliability, simplicity, ease of use and durability. They also use less power. And Dietzen says that Pure has found a way to bring costs down so that the company's flash technology is on par with what corporations pay for disk storage.
That's an attractive proposition for Pure's customers, including SurveyMonkey, Shutterfly and LinkedIn. It's also a formula that's enabled the company to increase revenue 300 percent in the fiscal year ended in January 2015, as well as attracted $470 million in venture financing from investors including Fidelity Investments, Greylock Partners and Index Ventures. Now the company, valued at $3 billion, is rumored to be readying an IPO for later this year.
Source: Pure Storage
(left to right) Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen and co-founders John Hayes and John "Coz" Colgrove
"We are seeing disruption in action as more customers fundamentally reconsider how they buy and use storage to operate with greater speed, to be smarter in their business and to increase innovations across their organizations."
Read MorePure Storage was No. 19 on the 2014 CNBC Disruptor 50.
