SEATTLE, Wash., September 18, 2024 —Edera, the world’s only secure-by-design Kubernetes and AI solution, today announced it has raised $5 million in a seed round led by 645 Ventures and Eniac Ventures with participation from FPV Ventures, Generationship, Precursor Ventures and Rosecliff Ventures. Angel investors include Joe Beda, Filippo Valsorda, Mandy Andress, Jeff Behl and Kleiner Perkins scout Nikitha Suryadevara, among others.
While Kubernetes turned 10 years-old earlier this year, running secure multi-tenancy workloads remains an unsolved problem that’s costing companies millions of dollars. Edera is introducing a diverse set of technologies with a diverse team of experts to solve what has been the decade’s defining enterprise security challenge.
Edera uses a type 1 hypervisor to offer isolation at the container level for the first time, enabling companies to realize the original promise of Kubernetes and to move quickly to run GPUs for emerging AI workloads. Instead of running containers in Linux namespaces, Edera’s platform treats a container like a virtual machine guest. There is no shared kernel state between containers, and a memory-safe Rust control plane further secures workloads. Edera can be used anywhere users run their containers (public cloud, private cloud and on-premise) and doesn’t require virtualization extensions or custom infrastructure. It’s simple, delivers peace of mind and saves companies millions in cloud costs.
“Real innovation is rare. It’s more than a new application or gadget. Real innovation is born inside the brains of amazing humans who see a better way to do things, who crack the code and solve the puzzle,” said Hadley Harris, cofounder and general partner at Eniac Ventures. “That’s what is happening at Edera. They’ve assessed hypervisor technologies and new memory-safe principles and the Rust programming language to actually solve one of the biggest security challenges of this era. We couldn’t be more excited to support this work.”
While most enterprises today are using Kubernetes in production, nearly 70 percent have delayed deployments due to security concerns. Nearly 90 percent of those companies have reported at least one Kubernetes or container incident in the last 12 months and half have lost revenue and customers due to security incidents.
The evolution of the cloud and Kubernetes has resulted in security regressions that the industry has accepted as the norm. But as container adoption continues to grow, tools continue to sprawl and security incidents skyrocket, the wasted engineering time and tremendous cloud expense has become untenable.
“While companies have struggled for a decade to secure their Kubernetes workloads using a patchwork of tools and procedures that have never really worked, the answer has been sitting in front of us all along,” said Alex Zenla, CTO and co-founder at Edera. “Our product is built on proven technologies and introduces a memory-safe Rust control plane to radically change the Kubernetes security landscape. We’re incredibly excited to share what we’ve been able to build with our customers and the industry at large.”
Innovative vision will transform enterprise security and save millions of dollars industry-wide
Kubernetes security solutions today focus on detection after an attack occurs. Customers are layering tool upon tool, creating complexity on top of complexity with no real assurances in place. Edera runs containers securely from the start, eliminating the need for expensive, largely ineffective tools, and its paravirtualization mode removes the need for hardware virtualization support meaning you can run secure containers anywhere.
Edera is introducing the world’s only secure-by-design Kubernetes and AI solution to help security engineers eliminate vulnerability exploitation across clusters even before a vulnerability is reported and can become incidents that show up on a dashboard and to help CISOs gain the confidence that their organization won’t be the next one hit by attackers and splashed across social media. And by isolating critical infrastructure from container escapes, customers can finally be confident running real multi-tenancy environments, saving tens of millions of dollars in cloud costs.
“The original design goals for Kubernetes were for ‘soft’ multi-tenancy where there was a level of trust between users of a cluster. But as Kubernetes has found its way into more domains, the need for stronger security protections has become apparent,” said Joe Beda, angel investor in Edera and co-creator of Kubernetes. “Edera fills this gap by using virtualization to both reduce risks and, ultimately, reduce costs. It allows Kubernetes to go places it has never gone before!”
From an all-female founding team to a diverse group of investors and a surprising set of technologies, Edera is anything but the status quo.
Edera is founded by three female-identifying individuals:
- Ariadne Conill, co-founder & Distinguished Engineer, creator of Wolfi and maintainer for Alpine Linux
- Emily Long, co-founder and CEO, former COO at Chainguard and Anchore, among others
- Alex Zenla, co-founder and CTO, an early contributor to the Dart programming language at 13 years-old and founder of the DSA IoT platform at 14
Emily Long comes from an operations and culture background, bringing to the position of CEO a people-centric view that is often lacking in early-stage startups. Eniac Ventures came in as a lead investor, in part, because of this background. Skills like recruitment, setting culture and conflict resolution are incredibly powerful in the earliest stages of a company and are not often skills that can be taught. This is in direct contrast to traditional VC-funded startups in which the CEO is usually a technologist that is believed can be “trained up” on people and leadership skills. History tells us that hardly ever works.
“We want to build something different at Edera, not just in the technology we deliver but in the way we build and deliver it. That means creating an inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive and contribute to our mission in a very direct way,” said Emily Long, CEO and co-founder at Edera. “We know diverse teams deliver better outcomes, and we’re here to represent that however many times it takes.”
With women, people of color and LGBTQIA+ among their founders and principals, 645 Ventures and Eniac Ventures round out Edera’s intentional focus on building a team that values diversity of thought, lived experience and technology backgrounds. The $5 million seed round will be used to build out the Edera team while supporting new customers and partnerships.
"What's most exciting about Edera is the power of the technology itself. It can not only solve immediate, long-standing pain points like container escapes but can also be a game changer in the increasingly complex and changing world of securing and managing AI workloads,” said Mendy Yang, senior associate at 645 Ventures. “We are so excited to work with the team to build something truly revolutionary."
Edera Protect Kubernetes is available to try now. Edera Protect AI is in development and accepting design partners. Edera also hosts Krata, a set of open source components written in Rust for secure hypervisor technologies. For more information, please visit: https://edera.dev/
About Edera
Edera is changing the way containers are run and secured, making isolation a reality and fundamentally transforming computing in the process. It is an enterprise infrastructure company that delivers container isolation for the first time by using a type 1 hypervisor and a memory-safe Rust control plane. It enables security engineers to achieve multi-tenancy Kubernetes and AI workload security in a way that is secure from the start, simple and cost-effective. Edera is female founded and places the same value on soft and hard skills to create a balanced and innovative company and considers diversity of experience and thought a non-negotiable. For more information, please visit: https://edera.dev/
Media Contact for Edera
Jennifer Cloer
503-867-2304
jennifer@storychangesculture.com
