- Edgeless Systems is a confidential computing company that recently raised $5.3 million. This is the story behind the company.
Edgeless Systems is a confidential computing company that is turning the public cloud into a safe place for sensitive data. The company recently announced that it raised $5.3 million in a seed round of funding led by SquareOne along with angel investors that include Evan Weaver (founder of Fauna), Mirko Novakovic (exit of Instana to IBM), Paolo Negri (founder of Contentful), Mathias Biilman and Chris Back (founders of Netifly). To learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed Edgeless Systems CEO Felix Schuster.
Felix Schuster’s Background
Schuster and Thomas Tendyck met while studying cybersecurity at the University of Bochum in Germany. After and during his Ph.D., Schuster worked at Microsoft Research and was one of the first to work on confidential computing at Microsoft. When Schuster pitched Tendyck the idea to start Edgeless in 2019, he was working as an engineer at an anti-virus company.
From there, they both decided to quit their jobs, started prototyping, and incorporated the company in 2020.
How did the idea for Edgeless Systems come together?
The team initially wanted to use confidential computing to build a new type of data marketplace where actors could share and sell data without revealing the data to each other. Then they soon realized that building successful marketplaces is very difficult and decided to focus on building infrastructure tools for confidential computing instead.
The process of building the company was an iterative process.
“To learn where the customers are and what they want, we decided to pursue an open-source strategy early on. Based on feedback and usage metrics, we axed some products along the way and doubled down on others,” said Schuster. “Our tech has evolved quite a bit. Initially, we could only protect single applications and we required some modifications to those applications. By now, we can protect and runtime-encrypt entire Kubernetes clusters potentially running thousands of unmodified containers.”
What are Edgeless Systems’ core products?
The company’s core product is Constellation. Constellation is being used by hundreds of developers and DevOps engineers at companies such as Bosch, IBM, and Intel, among others.
“Constellation is a standalone Kubernetes that can run and scale any containerized app. The key feature of Constellation is that it keeps all data in a cluster always encrypted – at rest, in transit, and even during processing. This way, even highly sensitive data can now be processed in the cloud without having to worry about third-party access,” added Schuster.
What have been some of Edgeless Systems’ biggest milestones?
Schuster highlighted these milestones:
– Mark Russinovich (Azure CTO) giving the keynote at our 2022 Open Confidential Computing Conference
– The open-source release of Constellation in September 2022
– The two financing rounds (now and in June 2021)
What is the total addressable market (TAM) size that Edgeless Systems is pursuing?
Schuster cited The Everest Group predicting a total addressable market of over $50 billion by 2026 for confidential computing.
“We believe that ultimately large parts of the cloud market will be addressable. Soon people will expect to have runtime encryption, just like they today expect to have transport encryption via TLS,” explained Schuster.
What distinguishes Edgeless Systems from its competition?
“We are the only ones encrypting entire clusters,” noted Schuster.
What are some of Edgeless Systems’ future company goals?
“We plan to double our headcount this year and grow significantly beyond the $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) milestone,” replied Schuster.
