When Alex Zenla worked in the security on the Internet of Things in the mid -2010s, he recognized something worrying.
In contrast to PCs and servers that announced the latest, largest processors, the measly chips in IoT devices could not support the cloud protection that other computers had used to keep them simple and protected. As a result, most of the embedded devices were attached directly to the local network, which may make them more susceptible to attack. At that time, Zenla was an amazing teenager who worked on IoT platforms and open source and built the community in Minecraft IRC channels. After confusing the problem for a few years, she began working on a technology to run almost every device in her own isolated cloud space, which is referred to as the “container”. Now, a decade later, it is one of three female co -founders of a security company that tries to change the way in which the Cloud infrastructure shares resources.
The company, which is known as an Edera, makes Cloud workload -isolation technology that sounds like a niche tool, but is supposed to tackle a universal security problem if many applications or even several customers use the common cloud infrastructure. The constantly growing AI workloads are based on GPU, for example more than to separate with guardrails and protect different processes. As a result, it is much more likely that an attacker who can affect a region of a system swivel from there and receive more access.
“These problems are very difficult, both in the GPU and the isolation of containers, but I think people were too liquid to accept compromises that were not actually acceptable,” says Zenla.
After a 5 million dollar -sowing round in October, Eötera today, Edera announced A 15 million dollar series A led by Microsoft Venture Fund, M12. The youngest in detailed financing messages is in itself nothing remarkable, but Edera’s momentum is remarkable in view of the current meaning. Damped VC landscape And in particular the purely female list of the founders of the company, which includes two trans women.
In the United States and around the worldVenture financing for tech startups has has always been a boy club With the vast majority of VC dollars go to male founders. Female founders who get initial backing difficult time Increasing rounds than men and are exposed to much steeper chances of winning to found another company after a failure. And these headwinds only become stronger than the Trump administration in the USA and the Big Tech assemble With regard to diversity, justice and inclusion, initiatives to raise awareness of this type of realities and the promotion of inclusivity should sharpen.
“We cannot ignore the fact that we are a small minority in our industry and that many of the changes that take place around us do not lift us up,” says Edera, CEO and co -founder Emily Long. “We are very proud and responsible when we are forward. Since we were founded, I have not been able to tell you how many incredibly technical, talented women have asked us to hire them from large institutions. So you see that you only show what is possible. “
For Zenla, Long and co -founder Ariadne Conill, which has a comprehensive background in the OpenSource software and security, the aim of developing the isolation technology of Eötera is to develop guidelines and separation in their systems, according to Mega spread.
“People have legacy applications in their infrastructure and use software at the end of life. There is no way to do security and believe that you can always patch any susceptibility to security, ”says Long. “But it naturally creates a pretty large risk profile. In addition, the containers were never originally designed in such a way that they are isolated from each other. Therefore, they had to choose between innovation, performance and security, and we don’t want people to have this compromise more. “
