With International Women’s Day coming up, it’s hard to ignore the fact that a team of women founders has been making waves in the realm of AI (artificial intelligence) protection and cloud security.
We’re talking about Edera, a security company founded by Alex Zenla, Ariadne Conill, and Emily Long that’s been pioneering a unique approach to cloud infrastructure security. The goal? To augment cloud workload isolation, thereby tackling a fundamental security flaw in shared cloud infrastructure that allows hackers to exploit vulnerabilities in cloud container defences and gain unauthorized access. Let’s do a deep dive into the challenge that Edera has taken on and its phenomenal rise in the world of cloud security.
Backstory
In the mid-2010s, forward-thinking and prodigious innovator and teenager Alex Zenla was networking in Minecraft IRC channels, working on open source and IoT platforms. That’s when she observed a critical gap in the security of IoT (Internet of Things) devices. IoT devices ran on puny, weaker chips, unlike traditional computers that had advanced processors with robust cloud protections.
Thus, IoT devices are vulnerable to network hacks and attacks since they are directly connected to networks without adequate protection. As a result, she was motivated to begin developing technology that would allow any device to operate in isolated cloud spaces, also known as “containers.”
A decade later, Edera was born. Today, it’s on a mission to revolutionize how cloud infrastructure operates and shares resources.
How Edera Works
In the last decade, AI workloads have been increasingly relying on GPUs (graphics processing units), which do not possess separation, physical autonomy, and independence. In this new cloud-native world, workloads run in containers in shared computing environments. So, there are no strong security boundaries between these different workloads. Hence, such shared cloud resources are vulnerable to attacks and need to be safeguarded against threats from hackers.
Edera’s innovations are extremely timely, with their groundbreaking cloud workload isolation technology specifically addressing these vulnerabilities with the aim of augmenting cloud infrastructure security. Their approach focuses on isolating the devices into individual, discrete cloud spaces. The company’s core innovation has been in designing and developing a container isolation system that betters cloud security by preventing compromised workloads from escalating into larger breaches.
This setup is different from traditional container approaches, where efficiency is prioritized over separation.
Edera’s technology allows the establishment of robust guardrails without having to sacrifice performance. This tactic is especially crucial in modern cloud environments, where shared infrastructure, outdated software, and legacy apps end up creating vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. Edera’s security-first solution aims to help enterprises manage cloud security vulnerabilities and risks without constantly having to pursue patch updates.
The idea is to be able to take advantage of both cloud-native and traditional virtualization computing techniques to build a computing environment with the security guarantees of traditional virtualization and also the presence of containers. So, hopefully, an exploited piece of vulnerability in one part of network equipment won’t — and also can’t — start a downward spiral into a catastrophic mega-breach.
That’s not all. Edera also reduces cloud computing costs significantly by allowing companies to consolidate workloads traditionally requiring specialized hardware or separate clusters — including GPU workloads — onto standard cloud environments while maintaining strict isolation. The multi-cloud compatibility reduces costs further by allowing workload portability and doing away with vendor lock-in.
Edera’s cloud isolation technology might sound like a niche tool, but its objective actually is to address a universal security problem — when multiple customers and diverse applications are using shared cloud infrastructure.
An All-Women Team
After a USD 5 million seed round in October, Edera raised USD 15 million in Series A funding helmed by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. The news about a tech firm bagging funding might not have been that remarkable had it not been for the fact that Edera’s momentum is notable, given that the glory days of venture capital (VC) have passed us by. Adding to that is the company’s all-female roster of founders, including two trans women.
This highlights their commitment to robust security solutions and diversity, given the challenges in the tech startup VC landscape that has traditionally been a boys’ club everywhere. Those female founders who bag initial backing also usually have a more difficult time raising subsequent funds, facing much steeper odds after the possible failure as compared to men. As co-founder Emily Long pointed out, women are a minority in the tech world, and the headwinds aren’t exactly blowing their way.
That’s why Edera and its team take great pride and responsibility in continuing to be in the front, making waves in the cloud infrastructure and security domain.
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