Nyriad CEO Matthew Simmons, pictured with the Warp Drive 4.0, part of NSULATE, which allows large-scale storage at speed, scale and resilience levels never achieved before.
Cambridge-based software company Nyriad is set to introduce around a hundred new jobs to town by the end of the year, with a recent funding round bringing in US$8.5M for the hyperscale storage processing company.
“It’s really going to aid our expansion as a company in terms of the number of engineers and team on board,” explained Matthew Simmons, CEO and co-founder of the company. “We’re growing the company by between 8 and 12 engineers a month, mostly out of the Waikato and North Island, but also from around the world.”
The opportunity is open to engineers as well as those who simply think outside of the box and have an interest in technology. “We guide them through a training process,” explained Simmons, “if they’re maths students, if they’re into bio science but they’ve got an interest in technology, and even if they’ve never programmed before, we’ll look at them.”
Potential candidates will go through a series of programming challenges over a number of weeks, “and if you can prove yourself over a period of time we’ll take you on board long term,” said Simmons. “It’s a very modern 21st century version of apprenticeship, specifically for IT.
“We can’t import engineers from other countries to build this tech, because they don’t’ exist, we have to create them from the ground up, we have to breed what we need. A lot of the tech we’re building, there are no answers, this is cutting edge stuff, so they have to be people who like to be in the thick of the problem, thinkers and problem solvers, people that think outside the box and are hungry to learn.”
Simmons and his co-founder Alex St. John, both Microsoft alumni and 30-year veterans of the tech industry, aim to build – and are already building – technology which will change the tech industry and lead it in a new direction over the coming decades. Within the next five years Simmons believes Cambridge won’t just be known for rowing and cycling, but technology too.
“We’re absolutely thrilled with the support we’ve been getting from Cambridge,” Simmons said. “We feel like we’ve got a real town behind us, and our intention is to make Cambridge proud of this company as well.”
The New Zealand Government is one of the many domestic and international investors that are backing Nyriad, which will release its first product to market at the end of March, called NSULATE – a block device which enables low cost, high-density data storage using a Graphics Processing Chip – which has never been done before.
“It basically enables incredible speed, efficiency and resilience on data,” explained Simmons. “It’s ideal for real time processing on large data sets like video data, medical data, where you’ve got hundreds if not thousands of hard drives.”
Product will first be released in BETA form, for sale with selected partners. More cutting-edge products will be released on the foundation of NSULATE, providing further data storage efficiency and security.
