While working on Things Internet Security in the mid-2010s, Alex Zenla realized something unsettling.
Unlike PCs and servers that tout the latest and greatest processors, the faint chips in IoT devices cannot support cloud protections used by other computers to keep them isolated and protected. As a result, most embedded devices are connected directly to the local network, which may make them more vulnerable to attacks. At the time, Zenla was a great teenager working on the Minecraft IRC channel and working on the IoT platform and in open source. After years of confusing this, she began to research a technology that enables nearly all devices to run in their own isolated cloud spaces, called “containers”. Now, ten years later, she is one of three female co-founders of a security company that is trying to change how cloud infrastructure shares resources.
The company, known as Edera, makes cloud workload isolation technology sound like a niche tool, but its purpose is to address common security issues when many applications and even multiple customers use shared cloud infrastructure. For example, the growing AI workloads rely on GPUs rather than standard CPUs, but these chips are designed for maximum efficiency and capacity Instead of separating the rails And protect different processes. As a result, attackers who can compromise an area of the system are more likely to transfer from there and gain more access.
“These issues are very difficult, both on GPUs and on isolated containers, but I think people are trying too hard to accept tradeoffs that aren’t actually acceptable,” Zenla said.
After $5 million seeds in October, Edera today Announce The $15 million Series A led by Microsoft Venture Fund M12. The latest granular funding news itself is not great, but Edera’s momentum is the current momentum, Silent scenery Especially the company’s list of all-female founders, which include two trans women.
In the United States and All over the worldrisk funding for technology startups Always a boys club The vast majority of VC dollars Go to the male founder. Female founders with initial support have more Tough times The subsequent rounds were raised compared to the man and faced steeper odds after the failure. These headwinds will only get stronger as the Trump administration and large-scale technology Install attack The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Programme aims to raise awareness of these types of realities and foster inclusion.
“We can’t ignore the minority groups we have in the industry and the many changes that have taken place around us have not improved us,” said Emily Long, CEO and co-founder of Edera. “We are proud and responsible for moving forward. Since our inception, I can’t tell you how many technical, talented women have taken the initiative to ask us to hire them from large institutions. So you start to see only through existing and with It’s different, you’re showing what’s possible.”
For Zenla, Long and co-founder Ariadne Conill (with extensive background in open source software and security), the goal of developing Edera’s container isolation technology is to make it easy (at least relative to) implementing a strong IT organization by network engineers and IT managers (at least ) The guardrail and separation between its systems, so the vulnerability of being exploited in a piece of network equipment or rogue insider situation will not- nor can-stimulate a catastrophic giant outbreak.
“People have legacy applications in infrastructure and end-of-life software; there is no way to do security and trust you can always patch every existing vulnerability,” Lang said. “But it inherently creates a considerable risk profile. Most importantly, the containers originally designed are isolated from each other, so you have to choose between innovation, performance and safety, and we don’t want people to weigh it any more. ”
