ZEDEDA Closes $16M Series A Funding to Build the Cloud-Native Edge

ZEDEDA announced it has secured $16M in an oversubscribed Series A funding round. The round was co-led by Energize Ventures and Lux Capital, each of whom invests heavily in companies fundamentally advancing how society implements and utilizes advances in technology. The funds will go toward scaling ZEDEDA’s infrastructure, increasing R&D, and expanding sales, marketing, and customer success programs to provide greater support to its growing, global customer base.

Existing investors participating in the round included Wild West Capital, Almaz Capital, Barton Capital, and industry veteran Ed Zander, former CEO of Motorola and former COO of Sun Microsystems.

As part of the funding, Kevin DeNuccio, Founding Partner at Wild West Capital, Juan Muldoon, Principal at Energize Ventures and Bilal Zuberi, Partner at Lux Capital will be joining ZEDEDA’s board of directors.

Building Edge Virtualization for Connected Operations

Connected assets operating at the enterprise edge are forecasted to approach 20 billion over the next year and the vast majority of the massive amounts of data they generate will have to be processed at the cyber-physical edge. Organizations need a software-defined, hardware- and cloud-agnostic solution for processing that data. Since that processing will happen outside secure datacenters, the solution must be capable of scaling advanced applications like AI across large numbers of devices operating in industrial settings or remote locations while rebuilding security from the ground up in a zero-trust model.

ZEDEDA makes it possible to securely deploy any application, on any hardware, over any network, at the edge, that can operate autonomously – independent of the connectivity to the cloud or corporate data center. ZEDEDA’s open standards-based edge virtualization software gives organizations complete control of their edge data and avoids vendor lock-in regardless of the apps and clouds they choose to implement.

“Building, deploying, and running apps at the edge should be just as easy and secure as it is for the cloud today. This funding supports our vision of creating a cloud-native edge that is open-source, ultra-secure, and standards-based,” said ZEDEDA CEO Said Ouissal. “Removing the complexity of edge infrastructure in a way that is secure and vendor agnostic enables far greater control over corporate data. That, in turn, boosts business agility and innovation through the use of distributed and local AI and IoT applications acting on the massive amounts of edge data generated per second.”

ZEDEDA Series A Funding Fueling Momentum

ZEDEDA has partnered with a powerful group of seasoned investors with a track record of investing in iconic companies that play a central role in disrupting the status quo, revitalizing older industries, and speeding existing industries toward technology-driven efficiencies not previously thought possible.

“We have been very pleased to see the continued accelerated adoption of our technology by several enterprises, particularly within the energy and industrial organizations, and that consequently drove strong interest from many investors to participate in our oversubscribed Series A,” said Ouissal. “Energize Ventures and Lux Capital are exceptional and complementary investors, strongly aligned with our company vision, ambitions, values and principles, and I am excited to partner with them as we continue to build our leadership position in edge virtualization.”

Energize Ventures invests in companies that provide digital solutions that drive affordability, reliability, and security for energy and industry. “We’re thrilled to help build this foundational platform with ZEDEDA and enable more integrated, holistic, and scalable industrial IoT deployments” says Juan Muldoon, Principal at Energize Ventures, “Advances in data analytics and digital operations will continue to push processes closer to the sources of data across manufacturing, energy, industry, and retail. Today, there is a missing ‘connective tissue’ to facilitate deployment at scale and close the loop between IT and OT.”

IoT-related spending is estimated to surpass $1 trillion by 2020 with IIoT investment accelerating at a similar pace. By contrast, the projected market cap for cloud computing is expected to grow to $500 billion by 2020. However, the apps enabled by IIoT data are ultimately what impacts business and a standard way to secure, deploy, and manage those apps at the edge is expected to be the key to accelerating adoption and unlocking the value of these IIoT investments.

“At Lux, we partner with technology companies that are shaping the future, from autonomous vehicles and advanced manufacturing to retail innovations, energy infrastructure, and smart cities. To enable smart applications such as IoT data analytics, machine learning, AI, and hybrid/multi-cloud deployments, an open and unified edge computing architecture is required,” said Bilal Zuberi, Partner at Lux Capital. “ZEDEDA is an early leader in making this fundamental shift to hyper-connected, cloud-native infrastructure at the edge a reality.”

“Almaz Capital continues to be thrilled with the rapid progress ZEDEDA has made in advancing the future of edge computing,” said Geoffrey Baehr, Almaz Capital General Partner. “We see a tremendous opportunity in bringing modern security and upgradeability to the systems that run the critical infrastructure of the industrial world. The team has had a vision of an open, cloud-native edge from day 1 and their progress with customers as well as open source powerhouse Linux Foundation has made the decision to help accelerate their growth extremely easy.”

“ZEDEDA’s team was assembled with a diverse and unique experience set that has understood the challenges of distributed systems acting on edge data since our inception,” said Kevin DeNuccio, Founder of Wild West Capital and an early backer of ZEDEDA. “Their vision has delivered a cloud-native edge that deals with the massive scale, security, and diversity challenges for both new or legacy edge applications. Allowing organizations the freedom to choose and focus on how to take advantage of massive amounts of their edge data for AI and Machine Learning that provides the business agility, simplicity, and security of a cloud application will change how businesses create competitive advantage and ultimately how humans experience the world around us.”