ZEDEDA Grabs $26 Million

ZEDEDA scored $26 million in Series B funding, highlighting demand for edge infrastructure, even amid a slowdown in venture capital. The company says it will use the money to expand its operations across all fronts and grow its ecosystem of partnerships.

The funding, which brings the company’s total raised to about $55 million, is a vote of confidence in ZEDEDA’s technology, which orchestrates devices and applications associated with edge nodes – cameras, sensors, industrial controls, and the like --using microservices dubbed “unikernels.” While unikernels work with Kubernetes, Docker, and virtual machines (via application programming interfaces [APIs] and the Linux EVE-OS platform), they carry only the operating system needed to run the app – there are no runtimes or libraries to slow things down. This makes ZEDEDA’s service a faster, more efficient way to manage edge applications and gear at the site closest to the source of data.

Growth and Expansion

ZEDEDA officials claim that revenues have increased by a factor of 7 over the past 12 months, and that the number of nodes under management has quadrupled. This growth, they say, is a reflection of the momentum building in the edge infrastructure space, an area that has until recently been amorphous and a bit confusing to market observers. Those growth figures indicate a shift into higher gear.

While ZEDEDA isn’t forthcoming about its customers, it may be because some of them are also in its ecosystem – vendors that can make profitable use combining their products and services with ZEDEDA’s solution. These include vendors of edge development tools, frameworks, analytics apps, and hardware. It’s impressive that HashiCorp, PTC, Microsoft, SUSE, HPE, SuperMicro, Intel, NetFoundry, and others see potential in ZEDEDA to activate edge efficiency and security.

More Potential Partnerships

ZEDEDA also has the potential to work with networking gear and industrial control systems. This capability is reflected in the roster of ZEDEDA’s investors, which include Porsche Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures, Juniper Networks, Rockwell Automation, and Samsung Next. (Other investors include Coast Range Capital, Lux Capital, Energize Ventures, Almaz Capital, and EDF North America Ventures.) While ZEDEDA doesn’t advertise partnerships with any of these vendors, the possibilities for developing integral management for edge automation are intriguing.

“This latest round of investment validates that our open framework and ecosystem approach to the distributed edge is the ideal choice for the future of connected operations,” said Said Ouissal, co-founder and CEO of ZEDEDA, in a press release.

And consider what Juniper Networks’ Sujai Hajela, EVP, AI-Driven Enterprise, said in the same release:

“ZEDEDA provides a unified orchestration experience across hardware, software, networks and clouds, and this, along with impressive execution and ability to meet the ambiguous and evolving demands of today’s enterprise edge market, has made them a trusted partner for organizations looking to transform their operations.”

ZEDEDA, founded in 2016 and based in San Jose with offices in Bangalore, India, and Berlin, has hit a stride worth watching. It will be especially interesting to see how its ecosystem approach plays out against various developer solutions.