ZEDEDA Secures $72M in Growth Capital to Meet the Skyrocketing Demand for Edge AI and Computing

ZEDEDA, the leader in edge management and orchestration, announced today the closing of $72 million in growth capital, with the Series C round led by Smith Point Capital, founded by former Salesforce Co-CEO Keith Block.

As many of the world's largest companies launched and scaled their critical edge initiatives, they have standardized on ZEDEDA for their edge management and orchestration requirements. The latest funding enables ZEDEDA to further expand sales and marketing activities and accelerate research and development to meet the rising demand for edge computing.

According to Gartner®, "By 2027, 20% of large enterprises will have deployed an edge management and orchestration (EMO) solution, compared with fewer than 1% in 2023."* Simultaneously, the demand for AI and machine learning is also exploding. Gartner also predicts that "by 2026, at least 50% of edge computing deployments will involve machine learning (ML), compared with 5% in 2022,"* further accelerating the large-scale deployment of edge workloads and increasing adoption of edge management and orchestration.

"This latest round of investment validates our leadership position as the preferred choice of large enterprises for their edge management and orchestration needs," said Said Ouissal, ZEDEDA's CEO and founder. "Our unique and innovative product is powering the explosive demand of ubiquitous edge computing, underpinning our customer's AI and real-time data analytics initiatives. With this funding, we are well-positioned to further extend the cloud operational infrastructure model everywhere, to continue to delight our customers and to realize our vision of powering the next era of computing."

"We believe edge computing represents one of the next great waves of digital transformation given its unique ability to address the many challenges presented by an increasingly connected world, creating new category-leading companies like ZEDEDA," said Keith Block, CEO and founder of Smith Point Capital. "Said and his team have a big vision and have already solved critical pain points around deploying workloads at scale for several enterprise verticals. As they've built the industry-leading solution to power the edge, we are thrilled to lead the Series C round and help accelerate their position as the market leader for edge management and orchestration."

ZEDEDA Has Raised Over $127M to Date

With this latest round of funding, ZEDEDA continues to draw significant investment interest and, despite a current tight funding market, has now raised over $127 million in total since its founding. Hillman Company, LDV Partners, Endeavor Catalyst Fund and Forward Investments (DEWA) joined Smith Point Capital as new investors in the company. In addition, ZEDEDA saw strong support from returning investors in this round, including Lux Capital, Almaz Capital, Coast Range Capital, Juniper Networks, Emerson Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures, 5G Open Innovation Lab, Rockwell Automation and Porsche Ventures.

"Emerson customers rely on us to optimize their operations, and our DeltaV Distributed Control System is the foundation for this, providing intelligent control of all plant activities," said Claudio Fayad, vice president of technology, process systems and solutions at Emerson. "We have standardized on ZEDEDA as a critical part of our solution, enabling us to extend DeltaV to the distributed edge and provide AI-based data analysis for real-time support for automated decision-making."

"Our customers' demand for real-time control, visualization, and closed-loop process and asset optimization applications at the edge remains robust," said Arvind Rao, vice president of Industry Solutions at Rockwell Automation. "With our strategic partnership with ZEDEDA, we are able to offer industry-leading, centralized edge management solutions that deliver value across the lifecycle of our customer's applications, significantly reducing their total cost of ownership."

Latest Funding Caps a Year of Expanded Growth

The growth capital investment emphasizes ZEDEDA's remarkable business performance and growth over the past year. Annual recurring revenue increased more than 250% year-over-year, and the key metric of nodes under management increased by more than 300%, with 12 Global and Fortune 500 customers, capping another year of extreme growth and success. One notable example includes one of the largest global automobile manufacturers, which has standardized on ZEDEDA to modernize 70,000 dealerships, manufacturing facilities and service centers across 153 countries.

Other 2023 milestones included:

• Product & Technology Leadership: ZEDEDA introduced the industry's first application services suite, ZEDEDA Edge Application Services, to make it easier than ever for customers to instantly gain granular control across all of their edge applications, including their modern AI-based applications. The company launched another industry-first offering with ZEDEDA Edge Kubernetes Service, a fully managed Kubernetes service for the distributed edge.
• Expanded Executive Team: Steve Ackley joined as Senior VP of Global Sales to help the company expand into new regions, Darren Kimura was promoted to President and COO, and Raghushankar Vatte became Field CTO and VP of Strategy to focus on strategic customer relationships.
• Certification Program: ZEDEDA launched the ZEDEDA Certification Program, a new certification for customers, partners and employees to validate their knowledge, skills and abilities with the company's edge solution. ZEDEDA also launched ZEDEDA Certified Edge Computing Associate for anyone interested in learning more about the fundamentals of the edge computing industry.
• Market Validation: ZEDEDA was recognized as a "Leader" and "Outperformer" in the 2023 GigaOm Radar Report for Kubernetes for Edge Computing and positioned as a technology leader in the SPARK Matrix: Edge Management and Orchestration (EMO) Platform. ZEDEDA also achieved ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, the internationally recognized standard for information security.

ZEDEDA is actively hiring for Sales and Engineering roles across the globe. To learn more and to apply, visit ZEDEDA.com/company/careers/. To learn more about ZEDEDA's orchestration solution for the distributed edge, visit ZEDEDA.com.

* Gartner, Predicts 2024: Edge Computing Technologies Are Gaining Traction and Maturity, Thomas Bittman, Tony Iams, Sandeep Unni, Eric Goodness and Bob Gill, October 18, 2023. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

About ZEDEDA

ZEDEDA makes edge computing effortless, open and intrinsically secure ? extending the cloud experience to the edge. ZEDEDA reduces the cost of managing and orchestrating distributed edge infrastructure and applications while increasing visibility, security and control. ZEDEDA delivers instant time to value, has tens of thousands of nodes under management and is backed by world-class investors with teams in the United States, Germany and India. For more information, visit www.ZEDEDA.com.