Today, we feature one of the startups who chose the Elevator Pitch path of Challenge 1. The first Elevator Pitch winner is Edgeworx, a startup developing an application and security platform for the network edge. (For an overview of this challenge, go here: Challenge 1 Overview.)
Edgeworx was founded in 2017 and only emerged from stealth-mode in October 2018. The startup is backed by an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Samsung NEXT, Sequoia Seed, and CloudScale Capital Partners.
We put Farah Papaioannou, co-founder and president, on the hot seat, asking her about the market opportunity in this sector, why the edge is so important to next-gen applications, how they differentiate themselves versus competitors, and more.
(Answers have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.)
Startup50: What’s the big problem you address – from the customer’s point of view?
Farah Papaioannou, Edgeworx: The edge has become a market-defining trend for this decade. While companies have been deploying solutions in the field for quite some time, these have traditionally been vertically integrated, one-off, stove-piped solutions running on dedicated hardware.
Today, facing massive volumes of data, increased security concerns, and the need for real-time processing, companies recognize it is necessary to do at least some of their computing at the edge.
Startup50: Could you provide an overview of the market opportunity?
Edgeworx: With an expected 30 billion connected devices by 2020 (per IHS Markit), the global edge computing market is projected to be over $2T with a 40% CAGR.
We are witnessing a shift in the market where all devices as small as cameras and as large as cell towers, as ubiquitous as cars and as remote as oil pumps, as simple as lights and as complex airplanes are becoming compute devices that generate a scale of data that the cloud is unable to address due to latency, bandwidth, and security. At the most fundamental level, processing the data close to the source provides the advantage of real-time insights.
Startup50: Why is edge computing such a big deal? What’s wrong with the status quo?
Edgeworx: Edge computing is far more complex than just installing software locally on devices. It requires data management, remote control of software and hardware, and greatly enhanced security. In addition, building software applications for the edge is very difficult for the majority of programmers.
Startup50: How does Edgeworx improve computing and security at the edge?
Edgeworx: We are not just focused on security, data analytics, and real-time information, but our software also makes each one of these devices a software platform that can run as many applications as the underlying compute can support.
This creates a new market of applications that run at the edge and a new revenue stream for edge applications.
Startup50: A startup cliché that we tend to agree with is: Pioneers are the ones with arrows in their backs. Are you worried that you’ve entered this space too early?
Edgeworx: There are other companies approaching the edge as a new opportunity. It is not new for us: we have been building for the edge for almost a half a decade. We have already made and learned from all the classic edge mistakes.
ioFog [an open-source edge computing application platform managed by the Eclipse Foundation] has been in development for the majority of that time. We heavily focus on security at the edge where others don’t.
Moreover, while we are a horizontal play, we are seeing a lot of traction in the telecommunications, oil & gas, government/security verticals. We are not just solving a problem; we are developing an entirely new market and way to monetize that is growing rapidly.
Startup50: What is your #1 differentiator vs. competitors?
Edgeworx: Our blockchain-inspired security would be our #1 differentiator, but we also believe that our open source strategy is a differentiator. Whereas our competitors are closed source, proprietary solutions, we are completely open source.
The Eclipse Foundation is the pre-eminent destination for edge-related software. With the Eclipse brand behind us and the built-in 5,000,000 developer community it brings along with it, we have a target-rich environment to drive rapid adoption of ioFog and fill our pipeline with inbound requests.
By offering our technology as open source to the Eclipse foundation, we are able to provide a horizontal application platform that works in any industry, for any solution, on any device, while developers build the vertical applications. We enable them to build for the edge, and we run it for them. Additionally, they can monetize their applications through our microservices marketplace, generating a new industry for edge applications.
Startup50: Why do you believe your startup is the one who can bring change to the edge?
Edgeworx: We are building a horizontal edge platform that is device-agnostic, and, for the first time, it doesn’t need to be a verticalized solution. We like to think of ourselves as “Android for the Edge” in that we provide an open application platform.
By running/embedding ioFog, any device can become a software platform and can now serve, update, deploy, and delete remotely as many micro-services as the underlying compute can hold.
