One of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing innovators, ZEDEDA, developer of a secure, cloud-native orchestration solution for the distributed edge that’s built on an open foundation in order to prevent vendor lock-in, recently announced what they described as a “highly oversubscribed” $12.5 million expansion to its $16 million Series A round initially closed in February 2019, bringing its total funding to-date to $28.5 million.
New strategic investors Rockwell Automation, Juniper Networks, and EDF North America Ventures joined together to add fuel to ZEDEDA’s growth, as the company’s ecosystem and offering continue to evolve, with globally distributed implementations of their solution. Existing investors also participating in the round included Almaz Capital, Energize Ventures, Lux Capital, and HBAM.
ZEDEDA also recently revealed a big win with BOBST, a Swiss company that supplies machinery and services to the packaging industry. BOBST has 19 production facilities in 11 countries and employs more than 5,600 people around the world. Products include machines for the manufacture of packaging and its derivatives from solid board, corrugated board or flexible materials, and ZEDEDA’s “as a Service” orchestration combined with their integration with Microsoft Azure IoT is enabling the collection and application of data from machines in more than 50 countries.
During a recent joint webinar with ZEDEDA and Microsoft, Luciano Torres, BOBST’s Head of IoT, stated that BOBST felt the challenges of manual remote management at a volume of just ten machines. In an associated case study available on ZEDEDA’s website, BOBST highlights that ZEDEDA provided the perfect solution that got them to production in just five weeks, saving six months of development time. ZEDEDA is widely known for being the first in the industry to solve the unique challenges of deploying, managing, and securing hardware and applications at the distributed edge spanning on-premises, near-premises, and in the field.
ZEDEDA will use the new capital to continue to scale its operations, including investments in R&D, sales, and marketing.
With the edge computing market expected to more than quadruple over the next four years, enterprises are increasingly realizing that in order to execute their strategic vision in the real world, they must include an open remote orchestration foundation that provides the flexibility to scale amid the inherently diverse technology and skill sets found at the edge. This includes having remote visibility, control, and security, support for both legacy environments and modern containerized applications, and help in transitioning to an as-a-service model.
ZEDEDA’s cloud-based orchestration solution, sold and consumed itself entirely as-a-service, provides the required flexibility for end-users, OEMs, machine builders, technology providers, and system integrators, with support for any hardware, any application, and any cloud or on-premises system. The company expects to more than triple the number of edge nodes under customer management by mid-2021.
“Our new strategic investors, as well as the existing investors who joined in again, bring years of experience in our core industries of manufacturing, oil and gas, energy, telco, and retail,” said ZEDEDA founder and CEO Said Ouissal. “Their investment is a validation of our progress, but it also means we have the opportunity to meet the needs of any company who needs to orchestrate applications and hardware outside of traditional data centers.”
“We see investment in software development to be a key opportunity for driving future growth, including accelerating our Software-as-a-Service opportunities,” said Brian Shepherd, Senior Vice President, Software & Control at Rockwell Automation. “With its focus on providing a flexible edge architecture that meets the needs of existing industrial customers while providing them a path to modernization, as well as enabling new customers seeking to leverage more agile, cloud-native technologies, ZEDEDA’s as-a-service solution fits naturally into our overall strategy.”
“With our commitment to building a net-zero energy future, we believe it’s critical to enable energy providers to optimize operations, maximizing efficiency and output,” said Mary Ann Brelinksky, President, EDF Energy North America. “IoT and edge computing are instrumental in driving these efforts, and ZEDEDA provides the perfect computing foundation that will scale for the future, enabling our customers to implement new technologies that will analyze and respond in real-time to their operations.”
“At Juniper, we see the AI-driven enterprise as an important strategic opportunity in the market to enable businesses to extract and utilize previously unrecognized value from existing and new sources of data,” said Kevin Hutchins, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Business Development, Juniper Networks. “ZEDEDA operationalizes distributed edge computing, making it possible to implement and manage the entire process, from hardware to applications, in a secure and scalable manner.”
“As one of ZEDEDA’s early investors, we have been excited to see the company’s execution of its vision,” said Geoffrey Baehr, General Partner, Almaz Capital. “The market size of the edge computing market, combined with ZEDEDA’s ability to realize its vision into a generally available solution of strategic importance to its Fortune 500 companies, makes this the right time to significantly increase our investment in the company.”
A representative at ZEDEDA says it has more big announcements in the works.
Arti Loftus is an experienced Information Technology specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the research, writing, and editing industry with many published articles under her belt.Edited by
Maurice Nagle
