While working on internet-of-things security in the middle of the 2010, Alex Zenla realized something disturbing.
Unlike PCs and servers that have recommended the newest, best processors, the void chips in IoT devices could not support the cloud protection that other computers used to keep them siled and protected. As a result, most embedded devices were attached directly to the local network, making them possible more vulnerable to attack. At the time, Zenla was a wonderful teenager, he worked on IoT platforms and Open Source and built the community in Minecraft IRC channels. After she had put the problem about the problem for a few years, she started working on a technology to make it possible for almost every device to run on his own isolated cloud space, known as a 'container'. Now, ten years later, she is one of the three female co -founders of a security company trying to change how Cloud infrastructure shares.
Known as Edrera, the Cloud -Work StaG insolation technology company that may sound like a niche tool, but it is intended to tackle a universal security problem when many applications or even multiple customers use shared cloud infrastructure. Eer-growing AI-workload, for example, rely on GPUs for rough processing power instead of standard CPUs, but these chips are designed for maximum efficiency and capacity rather than with guardrails to separate and protect different processes. As a result, an attacker that can put a region of a system is much more likely to be able to run from there and gain more access.
“These problems are very difficult, both on the GPU and on the isolation of the container, but I think people were too unfortunate to accept considerations that were not really acceptable,” says Zenla.
After a $ 5 million seed round in October, Edera today announced a Serie A of $ 15 million under the leadership of Microsoft's Venture Fund, M12. The latest news in the grainy financing is nothing remarkable in itself, but Edera's Momentum is remarkably given the current, Gedempte VC landscape and, in particular, the completely female schedule of the company of founders, including two transvrouwen.
In the United States and all over the world, venture financing for technical startups has always been a boy's club, where the vast majority of VC dollars go to male founders. Female founders who receive initial support have a more difficult time to set up subsequent rounds than men and are confronted with many steeper opportunities that another company sets up after failure. And that headwind only becomes stronger as the Trump administration in the US and Big Tech attack on diversity, fairness and inclusion initiatives that are intended to increase awareness about these types of realities and to increase inclusiveness.
“We cannot ignore the fact that we are a small minority in our industry and that many of the changes that happen around us do not lift us,” says Eminera CEO and co -founder Emily Long. “We take great pride and responsibility to stay at the front about this. Since our foundation I cannot tell you how much incredibly technical, talented women have asked us proactively to hire them from large institutions. So you start seeing that by existing and being different, you show what is possible. “
For Zenla, Long, and co -founder Ariadne Conill, who has an extensive background in Open Source Software and Security, the aim of developing Edera's container insulation technology to make it easy (at least relatively speaking) for networking engineers and IT managers to make it Robust to implement guardrails and separation over their systems, so a exploited vulnerability in one piece of network equipment Or a rognale insider situation will not – and cannot – spirit in a disastrous Mega -Breach.
“People have legacy applications in their infrastructure and use software for the end of life; There is no way to do safety and to believe that you can always patch any existing vulnerability, “says Long. “But it inherent creates a fairly large risk profile. Moreover, 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 assessment anymore. “
