Silica Storage launches DNA cold storage service and raises $35M Series A

Tech · 4 min read

Silica Storage is offering a managed cold storage service that encodes customer data into synthetic DNA for archival retention measured in centuries. The company built a retrieval workflow that promises mm-level physical indexing and standardized error-correction to make infrequent retrieval economically viable.

The Series A was led by Material Ventures and will finance automated synthesis farms and cooperative research into lowering per-byte costs. Silica Storage plans to offer hybrid packages with physical and digital cold copies for enterprise archives.

Product teams targeting compliance-heavy domains like media archives and scientific repositories are the primary early market. Silica Storage emphasizes durability and energy efficiency compared to tape libraries, though they acknowledge the technology remains suited to rarely-accessed datasets due to current retrieval latencies.