Edera, a Seattle early stage startup building workload isolation technology to mitigate lateral movement and block “living off the land” attack techniques, has banked $15 million in a Series A round led by Microsoft’s M12 Venture Fund.
The company said the new financing also included investments from Mantis VC and In-Q-Tel (IQT), Eniac Ventures, 645 Ventures, FPV Ventures, Precursor Ventures, and Rosecliff Ventures. Edera’s total funding has now reached $20 million.
Founded by CEO Emily Long, formerly of Chainguard, and co-founder Alex Zenla, an ex-Googler with a notable early start in cybersecurity, Edera has ambitious plans to create new secure-by-design Kubernetes and AI infrastructure by rethinking how Kubernetes containers run at the lowest levels.
Using its cloud-native Type 1 hypervisor technology, the company is pitching the Edera Protect Kubernetes product that promises to eliminate reliance on traditional namespace security and stops container escapes with just a couple lines of YAML.
Edera Protect Kubernetes promises hard isolation for each container, meaning every workload runs in its own secured kernel environment. This approach promises zero escapes and strong security guarantees without impacting performance, the company said, noting that the technology is designed to integrate seamlessly with any Kubernetes platform, whether on public clouds, private data centers or on-premises.
In parallel, the company is also marketing an Edera Protect AI product that promises to address security needs of organizations running AI workloads. With out-of-the-box GPU configuration, the product automatically detects and secures any GPU, isolating drivers and virtualizing resources to prevent lateral movement.
“Traditional solutions either compromise performance or require complex configuration changes, leaving platform teams frustrated and security teams alarmed. This problem is especially prevalent in AI workloads, where shared GPU resources amplify security risks. Edera solves these challenges by making workload isolation a reality for the first time,” the company said in a note announcing the funding.
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