Edera, a startup that aims to simplify and improve the way Kubernetes containers and AI workloads are secured by providing a new hypervisor, today announced that it has raised $5 million in a seed funding round led by 645 Ventures and Eniac Ventures.
Although Kubernetes has been around for a decade, Edera founders Ariadne Cornil (distinguished engineer), Emily Long (CEO), and Alex Zenra (CTO) argue that securing multi-tenant workloads remains an unsolved problem.
Long was previously COO of Chainguard and Anchore and has an extensive background in operations and culture, while Conill is the creator of the security-focused Linux distribution Wolfi and maintainer of Alpine Linux. Conill also worked at Chainguard before starting Edera, where he met Long.
Meanwhile, Zenla has worked as an engineer at companies like Radix and Google, and has been a longtime open source maintainer and contributor. With a long history of IoT at Google and even longer in the open source world, working on projects like Dart and Chromium, Zenla has seen firsthand how difficult it is to do hardware virtualization at the edge.
“Hardware virtualization is often not available, because the chip running inside that hardware might not have hardware virtualization at all, or it might be disabled,” she said. “What I realized is that there is currently no solution to this. There is no way to run isolated containers that don’t sacrifice performance or require hardware virtualization. So I knew I had to look into this because I get frustrated when my stuff isn’t safe.”
Zenla eventually went back to Xen, an open source hypervisor project that in many ways enabled the cloud computing revolution. Xen doesn’t require hardware virtualization, partly because it hadn’t been invented yet when Xen was first released in 2003.
“What I’ve found is that when something new comes along, older technologies get misunderstood or put on the back burner,” she said. “No one seems to be looking at it and thinking, ‘Well, what was the good idea there? Or what’s the challenge we’re having today, and could that good idea help us solve it?’ I think a lot of innovation comes from looking at the past and combining the present with the new. So when I realized that we could run Xen on hardware devices at the edge, I started developing that concept.”
To do so, Zenla essentially rewrote Xen in Rust, but at the time her focus was on edge devices. After talking to Conill and Long, she realized she might have been thinking too small, and was able to adjust the project to help secure not just the edge, but all cloud-native infrastructure. To date, that vision has shifted to securing AI workloads running on GPUs.
“Kubernetes was originally designed with ‘soft’ multi-tenancy, where there is a level of trust between cluster users. But as Kubernetes has expanded into more domains, the need for stronger security protections has become clear,” said Joe Beda, Edera angel investor and co-creator of Kubernetes. “Edera fills this gap by using virtualization to reduce risk and ultimately cost. It allows Kubernetes to go places it has never been before!”
We’ve seen previous efforts to better secure containers, including the Kata Containers project, but the Edera founders argue that while these solutions were essentially bolted onto existing projects, Edera’s low-level hypervisor was built from the ground up with security in mind.
“People try to solve this problem by adding a ton of layers,” Jennra said. “You see it in tool layering. It seems like every major company has 30 different Kubernetes tools and Kubernetes security tools. People spend all day looking at logs, and we think, why don’t we just fix it?”
For AI use cases, just being able to virtualize and share GPUs is a huge win for the industry, but the team is also working on adding confidential computing support to the solution. The company is working with a series of design partners to test this technology, but today’s announcement opens the Kubernetes project to a wider audience.
Speaking about the funding round, Long said the team of three female co-founders “felt a little bit intimidated. Ultimately, we realized there were a lot of VCs who shared a common passion for the technology that we were a part of, who wanted to see computing change, and who wanted to see more diverse teams do that.” The real challenge, she said, was getting people to understand the difference between typical Kubernetes security solutions that exist today (which she argues are more focused on observability, monitoring, and alerting) and what Edera is building.
In addition to 645 Ventures and Eniac Ventures, FPV Ventures, Generationship, Precursor Ventures, and Rosecliff Ventures also participated in the round. Angel investors included Joe Beda, Filippo Valsorda, Mandy Andress, Jeff Behl, and Kleiner Perkins scout Nikitha Suryadevara.
