Avalanche Technology Secures $30 Million to productize a new class of non-volatile magnetic memory and product solutions

Fremont, Calif. – July 30, 2012 Avalanche Technology, Inc., the industry leading innovator of Spin Programmable Memory (SPMEM™) spin-transfer torque (STT_MRAM), today announced that it has closed its third round of equity funding by raising $30 million dollars. This round has full participation from Avalanche’s current investors including Vulcan Capital, Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Thomvest Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures and included new investor VTB Capital. These funds will be used to further the development and bring into production Avalanche’s leading edge, proprietary, non-volatile storage class memory solutions.

Avalanche’s patented SPMEM™ technology has been successfully demonstrated on silicon show casing its stability, reliability, unlimited endurance, and scalability, while exhibiting high performance, significantly lower power dissipation, and virtual complete resistance to external perturbation. Avalanche’s SPMEM™ technology essentially solves many of the challenges other existing memory technologies such as DRAM, SRAM, Flash, NOR and Field MRAM memories face today including lack of scalability, high leakage, low endurance/wear-out as well as larger cell sizes and high power consumption. Avalanche has been developing its SPMEM™ technology since 2006 and is currently working with leading world-class 300mm fab partners and OEM customers on rapid prototyping and production of its first generation SPMEM™ embedded and stand-alone products processed at ≤65nm CMOS. This places Avalanche at the forefront of non-volatile storage class memory solutions that will be utilized in the solid state storage market, such as SSD, as well as enable mobile, networking and computing platforms to take advantage of the many attributes of STT-MRAM. “Avalanche customers can choose to embed SPMEM™ technology into their existing and next generation system-on-chip (SOC) solutions as well as design in Avalanche’s branded stand-alone discreet devices enabling customers to essentially replace several memory types with one common memory interface/technology” said Michael Ofstedahl, VP Business Development for Avalanche.

“This round of funding will enable Avalanche to deliver in production this extremely highly sought after memory technology,” said Petro Estakhri, founder and CEO of Avalanche Technology. “We are moving quickly toward delivering this groundbreaking patented technology ideally suited for high volume applications across a number of computing platforms to key customers we are currently working with.” Estakhri added, “its a pleasure to welcome VTB Capital to the Avalanche team including our Board of Directors.”

“Avalanche has an extremely promising combination of a cutting-edge proprietary technology for high-volume markets and a seasoned and very ambitious team of industry veterans who were able to build very successful memory companies in the past, taking them from scratch to billion dollars in revenues and IPO”, said Aidar Kaliev, Global Head of Venture Capital at VTB Capital. “We were strategically interested to have an investment in next generation memory technologies, and have decided to bet on Avalanche.”

About Avalanche SPMEM™/STT-MRAM

Avalanche’s SPMEM™ unique characteristics make it particularly suitable to a wide variety of telecommunication, networking, computing and handheld applications currently using DRAM, SRAM, NOR and/or Flash memory technology. Unlike traditional field write MRAM, Avalanche’s SPMEM™ utilizes a revolutionary proprietary spin current and voltage switching technology allowing for lower write current, smaller cell size and excellent scalability to future technology nodes beyond 10nm. It is the only truly scalable new memory technology providing nonvolatility, scalability, low power dissipation, unlimited-write-endurance, high-density, and high-performance. It is particularly well suited to applications requiring high data reliability and high performance and has the unique potential of becoming the next generation of universal embedded memory technology for SOC as well as stand-alone devices in a number of high availability storage applications.

About Avalanche

Avalanche Technology is a mid-stage company comprised of successful serial entrepreneurs and veterans in semiconductor, memory and storage industries. Avalanche Technology set out to fundamentally change the memory industry with a disruptive low power, high performance, scalable, non-volatile magnetic memory protected by a comprehensive US and foreign patent portfolio. The company licenses its technology platform for embedded and standalone chip applications in a wide variety of telecommunication, networking, storage, computing and handheld applications. Avalanche is supported by top tier VC’s including Vulcan Capital, Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Thomvest Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Leader Ventures and VTB Capital.

About VTB Capital

VTB Capital, the Investment Business of VTB Group, is one of the three strategic business arms of VTB Group, along with the corporate and retail businesses. Since its foundation in 2008, VTB Capital has taken part in more than 288 ECM and DCM deals, which were instrumental in attracting more than USD 117.65bn worth of investments to Russia and CIS.VTB Capital offers a full range of investment banking products and services to Russian and international clients, focusing on arranging operations in the debt, equity, global commodities markets, developing investment and asset management, advising clients on M&A and ECM deals in Russia and abroad. VTB Capital operates in Moscow, London, Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong, Sofia, New York, Paris and Vienna, with headquarters in Moscow. VTB Capital holds top positions in the debt and equity capital markets in Russia and CIS according to the league tables for 2011 by Dealogic and Bloomberg. In 2011 and 2012 VTB Capital research team was ranked #1 in Thomson Reuters Extel Survey and Institutional Investor All-Russia Investor Survey.