Edera, a cloud infrastructure startup founded this year, raises $5M to rethink container security

Seattle-based startup Edera announced a $5 million seed round from venture capital firms and angel investors include Kubernetes co-creator Joe Beda.

Founded in April, Edera aims to help companies secure their Kubernetes and AI workloads. It’s taking a new approach to the security of containers, a virtualization software technology that packages application code.

The company has two products. Protect Kubernetes is designed to secure workloads by isolating containers and eliminating container escapes. Protect AI provides GPU configuration and security specifically for AI workloads, and can isolate workloads from a GPU driver.

Here’s more about how the technology works, from the company’s press release:

Instead of running containers in Linux namespaces, Edera’s platform treats a container like a virtual machine guest. There is no shared kernel state between containers, and a memory-safe Rust control plane further secures workloads. Edera can be used anywhere users run their containers (public cloud, private cloud and on-premise) and doesn’t require virtualization extensions or custom infrastructure.

“It’s infrastructure meets cybersecurity,” said Edera CEO Emily Long. “We change the way containers are run, which inherently makes your infrastructure more secure.”

Long co-founded the 7-person company with Ariadne Conill and Alex Zenla.

Long is the former COO at cybersecurity startup Chainguard, another Seattle-area startup that became a unicorn earlier this year. Conil also worked at the company as a principal engineer.

Zenla is a former engineer at DB Engineering Inc., where she helped advise Google on IoT technologies.

“We’re really proud to be a female-founded company in this industry,” Long said. “It’s very rare to have all females being founders.”

Edera is working with design partners and does not yet have paying customers.

645 Ventures and Eniac Ventures led the seed round, which included participation from FPV Ventures, Generationship, Precursor Ventures, and Rosecliff Ventures.

As Kubernetes has “found its way into more domains, the need for stronger security protections has become apparent,” said Beda, who helped create Kubernetes and later sold Seattle startup Heptio to VMware.

“Edera fills this gap by using virtualization to both reduce risks and, ultimately, reduce costs,” Beda said in a statement.

Other angel investors include Filippo Valsorda, Mandy Andress, Jeff Behl, and Nikitha Suryadevara.