Dr. Charles Fan EE'95

Charles Fan, CEO and co-founder of MemVerge, started the company with his dissertation advisor at CalTech, Shuki Bruck. The two are banking on memory becoming the platform for all application data.  The goal is to eliminate the transfers of data between memory and storage, thereby creating greater speed for applications.

In a 2020 interview, he said, “If we can imagine a world where memory is big enough, persistent enough, and reliable enough that it can hold all the data all the time, then you’d never need to move data anymore and do that unnecessary work.”

Fan, who was formerly the CTO and cofounder of Rainfinity, grew up in China and attended high school in Indiana before earning his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at The Cooper Union. He’s noted that despite all he’s learned through his many work experiences in technology, his time at Cooper was formative: “The four years in New York City were the most educational. I had the opportunity to be on my own and to socialize with a lot of different people, I worked on a lot of different things, and I was surrounded by a lot of different stimulating disruptions. Those were growing years for me.”