I’m excited today to announce ZEDEDA’s most recent funding, a $12.5M strategic round led by new investors Rockwell Automation, Juniper Networks, and EDF North America Ventures. Our existing investors Almaz Capital, Energize Ventures, Lux Capital, and HBAM also joined this round, and we are grateful for their continued support and confidence.
This oversubscribed round provides additional confirmation of what we already knew: edge computing is a critical part of the digital transformation strategy within organizations. In fact, edge computing will transform these organizations.
Why do I believe this? As we talk to investors, and as we talk to customers, it’s become clear — customers are not only investing in edge computing, they are investing in edge computing companies, like ZEDEDA, due to the strategic importance of the technologies being developed. For organizations like our new investors, revolutionary organizations that are leaders within their industries, edge technologies provide a path to modernization through software, a path to optimization, a path to enter new markets and business models, and a path to recognize value from new sources of data.
And when we look back at 2020, a year of much uncertainty that sent many industries into a tailspin, we saw edge computing accelerate. Existing initiatives sped up, often with increased investment, and new projects were launched. As companies struggled to balance remote workforces with the need for in-person social distancing, the ability to remotely orchestrate operations and reduce the need for personnel to visit edge locations became essential. And beyond the obvious importance of limiting employee exposure to potential hazardous environments and avoiding unnecessary truck rolls or employee travel, organizations are now able to SaaSify their applications that must process data in real time at the edge.
We see organizations often beginning with a single edge use case, grasping the potential, and quickly expanding their plans to three or four more projects, and then continuing to grow. Edge computing provides for nearly limitless business innovation across every industry. We see this potential across our entire ecosystem — from optimizing wind turbine performance at Invenergy to connected machines from BOBST to smart pump technologies at PeopleFlo and to Agora’s transformation of the oil and gas industry — the potential of edge computing is ubiquitous.
This also illustrates the core of ZEDEDA’s vision — edge computing is of such strategic importance to organizations that they can’t afford to address it on a case-by-case basis. They must plan for this nearly endless opportunity by architecting an edge that is open and flexible, and able to support and grow with any future use case. This is why we often talk about how open source is in our DNA at ZEDEDA, and it’s what led us to donate the original source code for EVE-OS to LF Edge in 2019.
It’s only through the open, vendor-neutral, zero-trust security foundation of EVE-OS that organizations can gain the confidence that they will be able to support any hardware, application, or cloud strategy, without the risk of getting locked-in to something that doesn’t evolve with their needs. And on top of this ZEDEDA’s distributed edge orchestration solution makes edge computing effortless, providing visibility, control and security across an organization’s entire distributed edge landscape. Plus, our ecosystem of leading technology partners provides ready-to-consume solutions meeting needs across analytics and data management, network services, cloud and application enablement, and more.
Today’s announcement is an exciting milestone for all of us here at ZEDEDA. More importantly, it’s validation that the buzz around edge computing isn’t just buzz. The opportunity is real, the innovation is happening, and the companies propelled forward by their digital transformations will be those that approach their edge implementations with strategic understanding.
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