Charles Fan

Co-Founder and CEO MemVerge

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Charles Fan is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of MemVerge, a company he started in 2017 on a bet about memory. The original thesis was Big Memory: that persistent memory technology would let enterprises treat vast pools of DRAM-class storage as a first-class resource, and that software was needed to virtualise, snapshot and move it. That business earned eighteen US patents and customers in finance, life sciences and enterprise IT. The company has since pivoted the same underlying competence towards artificial intelligence, and now describes itself as a memory-centric AI software company, shipping MemMachine, an open-source AI memory engine, and MemoryBox, a personal AI memory application launched in beta in August 2026 that keeps a user’s context on their own device and carries it between ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other tools. Fan came to the problem after a career built entirely on storage and infrastructure – co-founding Rainfinity, founding EMC’s China R&D Center, running VMware’s storage business unit through the creation of vSAN, and serving as Chief Technology Officer of Cheetah Mobile.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded MemVerge in 2017 with Shuki Bruck, his Caltech doctoral advisor and the company’s chairman, and Yue Li, and has been chief executive since.
• MemVerge holds 18 US patents and serves customers across finance, life sciences and enterprise IT.
• Launched MemoryBox in beta on 6 August 2026, a personal AI memory product storing a user’s memories locally on their own device with semantic search across multiple AI assistants.
• Shipped MemMachine, an open-source AI memory engine, as part of the company’s repositioning from enterprise Big Memory to AI memory software.
• At VMware, as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the storage business unit and big data group, led the team that created VMware Virtual SAN.
• Founded EMC’s China R&D Center as a Senior Vice President after EMC acquired Rainfinity.
• Co-founded Rainfinity as a Caltech graduate student and, as its Chief Technology Officer, invented its file virtualisation and high-availability products.

Professional Journey

Fan’s career began in the lab. He took a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at The Cooper Union and then a master’s and doctorate in the same field at Caltech, where his advisor was Shuki Bruck. In 1998, while still a graduate student, the two co-founded Rainfinity, and Fan served as its Chief Technology Officer, inventing the file virtualisation and high-availability products that made the company an acquisition target. EMC bought Rainfinity in 2006.

At EMC he was a Senior Vice President and founded the company’s China R&D Center, a role that combined engineering leadership with the harder problem of standing up an offshore development organisation from nothing. He left around 2009 for VMware, where as Senior Vice President and General Manager he ran the storage business unit and the big data group. The signature output of that period was VMware Virtual SAN, the hyperconverged storage product that reshaped how VMware customers provisioned storage, and which his team built. He then spent a period as Chief Technology Officer of Cheetah Mobile, directing technology strategy across AI, big data and cloud and managing the global engineering platform team.

MemVerge followed in 2017. The founding trio – Fan, Bruck and Yue Li – reassembled the Caltech and Rainfinity relationship around a new hardware inflection: Intel’s Optane persistent memory, which for the first time made large, byte-addressable, non-volatile memory pools commercially plausible. MemVerge’s answer was Memory Machine, software that virtualised memory the way VMware had virtualised compute, adding snapshotting, cloning and transparent tiering. The company extended the idea into CXL-attached fabric memory and then into GPU-oriented products, addressing fast cold starts, checkpoint and restore across GPU failures, GPU fractionalisation and running stateful AI jobs on low-cost spot instances.

The most recent turn is the sharpest. MemVerge now presents Big Memory as what it pioneered rather than what it sells, and positions itself as an AI memory software company. MemMachine is an open-source AI memory engine; MemoryBox, released in beta on 6 August 2026, applies the same idea to individuals, storing context locally under the user’s control rather than inside any one model vendor’s account. Fan framed the launch as a step towards an AI future in which “your context, preferences, and ideas belong to you, travel with you”. It is a consumer-facing product from a company that spent its first eight years selling to enterprise infrastructure teams, which makes it a substantial strategic change rather than a line extension.

Education

California Institute of Technology

Doctor of Philosophy, Electrical Engineering

California Institute of Technology

Master of Science, Electrical Engineering

The Cooper Union

Bachelor of Engineering, Electrical Engineering