Lightbits Labs Named to Forbes’ List of America’s Best Startup Employers

Recognition follows record-breaking growth

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Lightbits Labs (Lightbits®), inventor of the NVMe® over TCP storage protocol, today announced it has been selected to Forbes’ list of America’s Best Startup Employers 2026. In partnership with Statista, Forbes analyzed three key criteria to determine the final list: Employer Reputation, Employee Satisfaction, and Company Growth. Lightbits Labs’ inclusion on this list of 500 employers signals that the company stood out among 20,000 eligible companies reviewed. This honor comes on the heels of a massive year for the company.

Lightbits recently reported a 3X year-over-year increase in software purchases, a 2X increase in average deal size, and a record-breaking 4X capacity purchase for a first-time deployment. This momentum is driven by organizations standardizing on software-defined, NVMe/TCP-direct storage to cost-effectively power performance-intensive workloads at scale, such as AI inference and real-time analytics, and to insulate themselves from volatility in the NAND and DRAM pricing and supply chains.

“The massive shift of silicon toward AI infrastructure, resulting in NAND and DRAM lead times hitting 52 weeks and prices soaring by over 250%, is problematic for legacy storage systems coupled to hardware. But for a true software-defined storage solution like Lightbits, a catalyst for our growth,” said Eran Kirzner, CEO and co-founder of Lightbits Labs. “Lightbits offers hardware agnosticity and efficiency. Organizations are turning to us as a critical survival strategy to modernize their data centers and insulate themselves from market shocks. Being listed on Forbes’ Best Startup Employers is validation that we have the right market fit at the right time.”

Lightbits’ software-defined storage — designed natively with NVMe over TCP, the protocol of the future for high-performance data access on low-latency networking — directly addresses today’s market realities. Lightbits enables organizations to build large, shared pools of NVMe performance that can be dynamically allocated across workloads over standard Ethernet networks, without specialized fabrics or proprietary hardware. In a market seemingly controlled by DRAM and NAND availability and prices, this architectural design delivers measurable advantages:

• Reduces Hardware Dependency: Enabling mixed NAND media type (QLC & TLC), and size to avoid procurement bottlenecks.
• Maximizes Existing Flash Assets: Instead of overprovisioning drives inside individual servers, enterprises can consolidate flash into shared pools, extracting more performance and capacity from already-deployed NAND investments.
• Extends Hardware Lifespan: Lightbits’ Intelligent Flash Management (IFM) dramatically lowers NAND wear, enabling organizations to extend the usable life of existing drives.

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About Lightbits Labs

Lightbits Labs® (Lightbits) invented the NVMe over TCP storage protocol and embedded it natively in their software-defined block storage to deliver ultra-low latency and exceptional throughput while leveraging commodity infrastructure—essential for reducing the cost and complexity of data infrastructure at scale. Built from the ground up for high performance, scalability, resiliency, and cost efficiency, Lightbits software delivers the best price-performance value for real-time analytics, transactional, and AI workloads. Lightbits Labs is backed by enterprise technology leaders [Cisco Investments, Dell Technologies Capital, Intel Capital, Lenovo, and Micron] and is on a mission to deliver best-in-class block storage for performance-sensitive workloads.

To learn more about Lightbits Labs, visit https://www.lightbitslabs.com/ and follow Lightbits Labs on Linkedin, X, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Lightbits and Lightbits Labs are registered trademarks of Lightbits Labs, Ltd.