We raised €1.45m to build the open-source stack for confidential computing!

We are thrilled to announce that Edgeless Systems just raised a €1.45 million seed round from Acequia Capital (US), Inventures (DE), SIX Group AG (CH), Venture Creator (DE), and individual angel investors. With the new funding, we can continue our mission to build the open-source software stack for cloud-native confidential computing.

Confidential computing combines hardware and software to make computing more trustworthy. It is a set of strict technical measures that keep data encrypted while it is being used in the cloud, overcoming a major barrier to cloud adoption in business. If you've never heard of confidential computing, you should read this blog post.

In recent months confidential computing created lots of excitement in the security community and beyond. Gartner and Forbes, for example, both named confidential computing as one of the most promising trends for cloud security. Furthermore, some of the largest American and Chinese tech companies and a couple of startups, including Edgeless Systems, have joined forces in the Confidential Computing Consortium to drive adoption and define standards for this new space.

Nevertheless, confidential computing is still a new space and clearly lacks software in general and in particular DevOps/dev tools. Therefore, we aim to fill this gap with easy-to-use and scalable open-source software:

The EGo toolkit enables developers to develop confidential cloud-native apps the way they are used to in the Go programming language.

The Marblerun framework enables engineers to manage and scale confidential apps in the cloud.

And we are currently working on the release of our third product: EdgelessDB, the first relational database build for confidential computing. While current databases can at most encrypt data at rest, EdgelessDB keeps it encrypted at all times and takes security to unprecedented levels. More information coming soon.

At Edgeless Systems, we strongly believe in the open-source idea. There is a special connection between open source and confidential computing: a key aspect of confidential computing is the verifiability of computations. This can only really work if we have an open-source software stack.

The last months have already shown us, that there exists a keen interest in confidential computing in the open-source community. In March 2021, we hosted the Open Confidential Computing Conference (OC3) with over 700 attendees and 14 speakers from top tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Alibaba Cloud. Furthermore, we got into Intel Ignite's first European batch. Stephen Heller from Intel says:

"Confidential computing is blowing up and Edgeless is at the forefront of this development. We are thrilled to have them in our first batch at Intel Ignite and strongly believe in their success."

Before this first investment round, we were funded with €1.2m in R&D grants from the German government. The new investment will be used to expand our 12-member team on both engineering and business site. Furthermore, we will expand our office capacities in Bochum, Germany, but still aim to build a hybrid workforce consisting of on-site and remote colleagues. By the way: If you've always wanted to work in a fast-growing open-source startup, here comes your chance. We're hiring!

Philipp Langnickel, Managing Partner at Venture Creator, stated in our official press release:

"We have been excited about the team and the vision of Edgeless Systems since our first meeting. Confidential computing is the next big thing for data security and privacy and we believe that Edgeless Systems, with its open-source approach, will become an important element for every developer in this new domain."

Sounds exciting? Then get involved! Follow us on Twitter, check out our GitHub repos, or even apply for one of our open positions right now and become part of our mission to build the open-source stack for confidential computing.

Exciting times ahead!

Author: Felix Schuster