Today I am excited and proud to announce that ZEDEDA has closed a $26M Series B funding round. ZEDEDA has now raised more than $55 million since its founding – doubling the previous investment.
This round of funding includes both new and existing investors – I am excited to welcome Coast Range Capital, Porsche Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures, and Samsung Next as new investors, who invested along with all of our existing investors Lux Capital, Energize Ventures, Almaz Capital, Juniper Networks, Rockwell Automation, and EDF North America Ventures. The breadth and type of investors in this latest round further signals the rapidly rising importance of edge computing to companies across all industries and verticals.
On behalf of the ZEDEDA team, I would like to thank all our investors for their support as we continue to lead and innovate in management and orchestration for the distributed edge!
Back to the Basics – the “Why”
Some might inquire, “why do you need a solution to manage and orchestrate the distributed edge?” For those who aren’t already aware, there is an explosion of data at the edge of the network happening – resulting from more devices, machines, sensors and applications that are getting connected. Moving these massive amounts of data to the cloud for processing is impractical given the operational cost (bandwidth, latency, autonomy, security and privacy) and potential short half-life of the data.
The only way to get cost-effective value in real time from this data is by processing it at the edge. Given the enormous scale of edge computing from processing data from millions of devices, there is a need to centrally manage and orchestrate nodes, security, and applications, at scale.
That’s our mission at ZEDEDA: delighting customers by making edge computing effortless, open, and intrinsically secure – effectively extending the cloud experience to the edge.
If You Want to Go Far, Go Together
A famous proverb states that, “If one wants to go fast, one should go alone, but if one wants to go far, one should go together.” At ZEDEDA, our vision is that we want to power the next era of computing to enable a better digital society – and therefore a better planet. In order to accomplish this bold vision, we will need to go far and thus we need to go together.
We’re ecstatic to leverage the new capital to support strong customer growth, accelerate research and development – and expand sales and marketing. The new capital will also reinforce our immediate priorities and goals to keep our company culture thriving, and to effectively nurture existing and new employees. At ZEDEDA, ranked #8 as Best Place to Work this year, we pride ourselves on sustaining a healthy, motivational, and innovative workplace environment.
As a global company with teams across many countries and with many different backgrounds – diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging – are core to our company culture. Also, part of our cultural foundation is that we all accept that we are all collectively and individually responsible for nurturing, growing, protecting, and developing our culture. For instance, we have collectively defined five specific values that we believe are paramount to our success. We call them the “Five Cs.” They are: courage, considerateness, candor, curiosity, and collaboration. We believe these five fuel the soul of our company and we factor these values into our day-to-day work goals.
Why these five? Well for starters, everything starts with courage. Courage to join a startup, be different, speak up, or take risks. However, courage needs to be balanced with considerateness. At the same time, it is also essential to nurture and cultivate trust through candor, such as honest communication. And, as we communicate with courage, considerateness and candor, we must also always try to be better at listening than speaking. That’s why we embrace curiosity, ask bold questions, and cultivate independent thinking. Ultimately, we are all in this together, as we want to go far, and the only way we will be successful is by working together as one. That is why collaboration is also a key component to our success at ZEDEDA.
While we feel responsible for our culture, we also feel responsible for our planet and that is why we believe it is part of our vision. One customer example of where edge computing is making a difference for our planet is our customer PV Hardware, a leading solar energy and services company, that is using our edge orchestration solution to ultimately reduce the cost of renewable energy. In addition to energy customers like PV Hardware, we see many other verticals using edge computing to do things like drive down energy consumption or accelerate the support of distributed software maintenance of electric cars, and we believe we still are just getting started.
Fulfilling Our Mission – Thank You
All aspects of our business – from a growing base of Global 500 customers to major strategic partnerships and growth in deployed edge nodes – are on a terrific path. 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. Within the past 12 months, we’ve seen a sharp increase in ZEDEDA’s growth as a company. Revenue is up 7x year-over-year, while at the same time, its number of nodes under management has risen by 4x. ZEDEDA’s strong growth is fueled by existing customers now applying the company’s solution across different edge deployments, in addition to new customers beginning their edge deployments.
I am thrilled and honored with all our progress to date, and as we keep going further, the team and I at ZEDEDA look forward to executing our exciting mission – to delight our customers by making edge computing effortless, open and intrinsically secure. We believe that the only way to accomplish our goals is by building and cultivating the right team. We also believe that our employees are our most valuable asset and what sets us apart. We are hiring, so if you’d like to join us on our mission – as we realize our vision of powering the next era of computing – please check out our careers page!
Once again, thank you to all who have supported us on this journey and cheers to our customers, partners, the ZEDEDA team, the Project EVE open source community and our brilliant investors, who made our success possible!
