While working on internet-of-things security in the mid-2010s, Alex Zenla realized something troubling.
Unlike PCs and servers that touted the latest, greatest processors, the puny chips in IoT devices couldn’t support the cloud protections other computers were using to keep them siloed and protected. As a result, most embedded devices were attached directly to the local network, potentially leaving them more vulnerable to attack. At the time, Zenla was a prodigious teen, working on IoT platforms and open source, and building community in Minecraft IRC channels. After puzzling over the problem for a few years, she started working on a technology to make it possible for nearly any device to run in its own isolated cloud space, known as a “container.” Now, a decade later, she’s one of three female cofounders of a security company that’s trying to change how cloud infrastructure shares resources.
Known as Edera, the company makes cloud workload isolation tech that may sound like a niche tool, but it aims to address a universal security problem when many applications or even multiple customers are using shared cloud infrastructure. Ever-growing AI workloads, for example, rely on GPUs for raw processing power instead of standard CPUs, but these chips have been designed for maximum efficiency and capacity rather than with guardrails to separate and protect different processes. As a result, an attacker that can compromise one region of a system is much more likely to be able to pivot from there and gain more access.
“These problems are very hard, both on the GPU and the container isolation, but I think people were too wiling to accept trade-offs that were not actually acceptable,” Zenla says.
After a $5 million seed round in October, Edera today announced a $15 million series A led by Microsoft’s venture fund, M12. The latest in granular funding news is nothing remarkable in itself, but Edera’s momentum is notable given the current, muted VC landscape and, particularly, the company’s all-female roster of founders, which includes two trans women.
In the United States and around the world, venture funding for tech startups has always been a boys club with the vast majority of VC dollars going to male founders. Female founders who do get initial backing have a more difficult time raising subsequent rounds than men and face much steeper odds founding another company after one fails. And those headwinds are only getting stronger as the Trump administration in the US and Big Tech mount an assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives meant to raise awareness about these types of realities and foster inclusivity.
“We can’t ignore the fact that we are a small minority in our industry, and that a lot of the changes that are happening around us are not lifting us up,” says Edera CEO and cofounder Emily Long. “We take great pride and responsibility in continuing to be in the front on this. Since our founding, I can’t tell you how many incredibly technical, talented women have proactively asked us to hire them from large institutions. So you start to see that just by existing and being different, you are showing what’s possible.”
For Zenla, Long, and cofounder Ariadne Conill, who has an extensive background in open source software and security, the goal of developing Edera’s container isolation technology is to make it easy (at least relatively speaking) for network engineers and IT managers to implement robust guardrails and separation across their systems so an exploited vulnerability in one piece of network equipment or a rogue insider situation won’t—and can’t—spiral into a disastrous mega-breach.
“People have legacy applications in their infrastructure and use end-of-life software; there’s no way to do security and believe that you can always patch every existing vulnerability,” Long says. “But it inherently creates a pretty large risk profile. And then on top of that, containers were never originally designed to be isolated from each other, so you had to choose between innovation and performance and security, and we don’t want people to have that trade-off anymore.”