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Edera Raises $5M Seed Round to Introduce the World’s Only Secure-By-Design Kubernetes and AI Solution

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Using type 1 hypervisor technology, Edera offers isolation at the container level, changing the way containers run and making container escapes impossible once and for all Companies both large and small can plug Edera in seamlessly and are poised to save millions in cloud costs From an all-female founding team to a diverse group of investors and a surprising set of technologies, Edera is anything but the status quo

SEATTLE, Sept. 18, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Edera, the world’s only secure-by-design Kubernetes and AI solution, today announced it has raised $5 million in a seed round led by 645 Ventures and Eniac Ventures with participation from FPV Ventures, Generationship, Precursor Ventures and Rosecliff Ventures. Angel investors include Joe Beda, Filippo Valsorda, Mandy Andress, Jeff Behl and Kleiner Perkins scout Nikitha Suryadevara, among others.

While Kubernetes turned 10 years-old earlier this year, running secure multi-tenancy workloads remains an unsolved problem that’s costing companies millions of dollars. Edera is introducing a diverse set of technologies with a diverse team of experts to solve what has been the decade’s defining enterprise security challenge.

Edera uses a type 1 hypervisor to offer isolation at the container level for the first time, enabling companies to realize the original promise of Kubernetes and to move quickly to run GPUs for emerging AI workloads. Instead of running containers in Linux namespaces, Edera’s platform treats a container like a virtual machine guest. There is no shared kernel state between containers, and a memory-safe Rust control plane further secures workloads. Edera can be used anywhere users run their containers (public cloud, private cloud and on-premise) and doesn’t require virtualization extensions or custom infrastructure. It’s simple, delivers peace of mind and saves companies millions in cloud costs. 

“Real innovation is rare. It’s more than a new application or gadget. Real innovation is born inside the brains of amazing humans who see a better way to do things, who crack the code and solve the puzzle,” said Hadley Harris, cofounder and general partner at Eniac Ventures. “That’s what is happening at Edera. They’ve assessed hypervisor technologies and new memory-safe principles and the Rust programming language to actually solve one of the biggest security challenges of this era. We couldn’t be more excited to support this work.”

While most enterprises today are using Kubernetes in production, nearly 70 percent have delayed deployments due to security concerns. Nearly 90 percent of those companies have reported at least one Kubernetes or container incident in the last 12 months and half have lost revenue and customers due to security incidents.

The evolution of the cloud and Kubernetes has resulted in security regressions that the industry has accepted as the norm. But as container adoption continues to grow, tools continue to sprawl and security incidents skyrocket, the wasted engineering time and tremendous cloud expense has become untenable.

“While companies have struggled for a decade to secure their Kubernetes workloads using a patchwork of tools and procedures that have never really worked, the answer has been sitting in front of us all along,” said Alex Zenla, CTO and co-founder at Edera. “Our product is built on proven technologies and introduces a memory-safe Rust control plane to radically change the Kubernetes security landscape. We’re incredibly excited to share what we’ve been able to build with our customers and the industry at large.”

Innovative vision will transform enterprise security and save millions of dollars industry-wide

Kubernetes security solutions today focus on detection after an attack occurs. Customers are layering tool upon tool, creating complexity on top of complexity with no real assurances in place. Edera runs containers securely from the start, eliminating the need for expensive, largely ineffective tools, and its paravirtualization mode removes the need for hardware virtualization support meaning you can run secure containers anywhere.

Edera is introducing the world’s only secure-by-design Kubernetes and AI solution to help security engineers eliminate vulnerability exploitation across clusters even before a vulnerability is reported and can become incidents that show up on a dashboard and to help CISOs gain the confidence that their organization won’t be the next one hit by attackers and splashed across social media. And by isolating critical infrastructure from container escapes, customers can finally be confident running real multi-tenancy environments, saving tens of millions of dollars in cloud costs.

“The original design goals for Kubernetes were for ‘soft’ multi-tenancy where there was a level of trust between users of a cluster. But as Kubernetes has found its way into more domains, the need for stronger security protections has become apparent,” said Joe Beda, angel investor in Edera and co-creator of Kubernetes. “Edera fills this gap by using virtualization to both reduce risks and, ultimately, reduce costs. It allows Kubernetes to go places it has never gone before!”

From an all-female founding team to a diverse group of investors and a surprising set of technologies, Edera is anything but the status quo.

Edera is founded by three female-identifying individuals:

Ariadne Conill, co-founder & Distinguished Engineer, creator of Wolfi and maintainer for Alpine LinuxEmily Long, co-founder and CEO, former COO at Chainguard and Anchore, among othersAlex Zenla, co-founder and CTO, an early contributor to the Dart programming language at 13 years-old and founder of the DSA IoT platform at 14

Emily Long comes from an operations and culture background, bringing to the position of CEO a people-centric view that is often lacking in early-stage startups. Eniac Ventures came in as a lead investor, in part, because of this background. Skills like recruitment, setting culture and conflict resolution are incredibly powerful in the earliest stages of a company and are not often skills that can be taught. This is in direct contrast to traditional VC-funded startups in which the CEO is usually a technologist that is believed can be “trained up” on people and leadership skills. History tells us that hardly ever works.

“We want to build something different at Edera, not just in the technology we deliver but in the way we build and deliver it. That means creating an inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive and contribute to our mission in a very direct way,” said Emily Long, CEO and co-founder at Edera. “We know diverse teams deliver better outcomes, and we’re here to represent that however many times it takes.”

With women, people of color and LGBTQIA+ among their founders and principals, 645 Ventures and Eniac Ventures round out Edera’s intentional focus on building a team that values diversity of thought, lived experience and technology backgrounds. The $5 million seed round will be used to build out the Edera team while supporting new customers and partnerships.

“What’s most exciting about Edera is the power of the technology itself. It can not only solve immediate, long-standing pain points like container escapes but can also be a game changer in the increasingly complex and changing world of securing and managing AI workloads,” said Mendy Yang, senior associate at 645 Ventures. “We are so excited to work with the team to build something truly revolutionary.”

Edera Protect Kubernetes is available to try now. Edera Protect AI is in development and accepting design partners. Edera also hosts Krata, a set of open source components written in Rust for secure hypervisor technologies. For more information, please visit: https://edera.dev/

About Edera  
Edera is changing the way containers are run and secured, making isolation a reality and fundamentally transforming computing in the process. It is an enterprise infrastructure company that delivers container isolation for the first time by using a type 1 hypervisor and a memory-safe Rust control plane. It enables security engineers to achieve multi-tenancy Kubernetes and AI workload security in a way that is secure from the start, simple and cost-effective. Edera is female founded and places the same value on soft and hard skills to create a balanced and innovative company and considers diversity of experience and thought a non-negotiable. For more information, please visit: https://edera.dev/

Media Contact for Edera
Jennifer Cloer
503-867-2304
jennifer@storychangesculture.com

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Northern Hemisphere Heat Drives Demand for Cooling and Sun-Protection Products on Yiwugo

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YIWU, China, July 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Yiwugo.com, the official website of the Yiwu Commodity Market, is the largest commodity wholesale market in the world. The final whistle may have blown on the World Cup, but the intense heat gripping the Northern Hemisphere shows no sign of letting up. Europe has experienced unusually hot weather this year, sparking not only a surge in demand for air conditioners but also a boom in portable handheld fans. Merchants on Yiwugo say that in previous years, European customers would begin placing orders in March or April and take their time completing their annual procurement. This year, however, the purchasing season has stretched well into summer, with a flood of new buyers coming in, most of them looking for small handheld fans. With customers eager to capitalize on the peak summer season, delivery timelines have also become significantly tighter. Whereas orders in previous years could generally be fulfilled within a month, merchants are now frequently being asked to deliver within about a week, leaving manufacturers scrambling to keep pace with demand.

Lingpan Official Flagship Store has specialized in the production and sales of small fans, insulated cups, and related products for 15 years. This summer, demand from European customers for high-speed small fans has risen sharply, accompanied by urgent delivery requirements. Many customers began requesting shipment just one week after placing their orders, hoping the products would arrive in time for the World Cup and the ongoing heatwave across Europe. One long-standing European customer purchased only five models of small fans from Lingpan last year. Anticipating stronger demand ahead of this summer, the customer expanded the order to 10 models. The first shipment sold out soon after arriving at port, prompting several subsequent repeat orders. European buyers have shown particular interest in high-speed cooling fans and placed great requirements on product quality. So far this year, Lingpan’s fan sales have more than doubled compared with the same period last year, with total purchases reaching approximately RMB 1 million.

Beyond Europe, the owner of Lingpan, Ling Pan pointed out that the Indian market has also undergone significant changes over the past two years. Indian customers are showing great interest in panda-shaped fans, drinking cups, and related products. Procurement volumes among many Indian buyers have increased substantially, with average annual purchases now reaching several hundred thousand yuan.

Unlike European countries grappling with sudden heat waves, Asian markets such as Japan and South Korea, where summers are consistently hot and air conditioners and fans are already everyday essentials, have shown much stronger demand for sun-protection products. From April 1, 2026 to date, sales of sun-protection masks on Yiwugo have increased by 31.6% YoY, while sales of sun-protection face shields surged by 72.42% and sun hats rose by 8.1%.

Chen Jia, a Yiwugo merchant, has engaged in the production and sales of sun-protection masks and sun-protection face shields for eight years. Chen operates the Xiao Zhen and Xiao Mian Sun-Protection Products Workshop in District 4 of the Yiwu International Trade Market. In recent years, the company has customized cooling nylon fabrics for customers in Japan and South Korea. Sun-protection masks and sun-protection face shields made from this material not only offer UPF 50+ protection, but also maintain a more structured shape and are less susceptible to snagging or deformation. Their protective performance remains effective after routine washing, and the products can last for more than five years under normal use.

In 2024, a TV shopping operator from South Korea contacted Xiao Zheng and Xiao Mian through Yiwugo and began placing orders after inspecting the products in person. Over the following two years, the company continued to improve the fitness and design of its sun-protection products. It introduced sun-protection face shields with breathable mesh panels and incorporated soft supports around the nose area to prevent the masks from rubbing against lipstick. These product upgrades have steadily driven up customer ratings on the client’s store. Annual procurement, initially valued at around RMB 300,000, has risen year by year, and the company has since developed into a recognized brand in the local market.

Persistent heat across the Northern Hemisphere has been creating new forms of cross-border consumer demand while enabling Yiwugo merchants to keenly capture shifts in overseas markets. From the strong sales of small portable fans in Europe to the rising demand for functional sun-protection products in Japan and South Korea, the diversity of orders reflects both consumers’ need for relief from extreme heat and the ability of Yiwu manufacturers to strengthen their presence in global markets through product innovation and rapid fulfillment. Faced with a rapidly changing international market, many merchants are continuing to refine product designs, upgrade fabric techniques, and enhance supply efficiency. By leveraging Yiwugo to broaden their export channels, they are keeping pace with overseas consumption trends and capitalizing on the expanding market for cooling and sun-protection products, turning the summer heat into new momentum for cross-border trade.

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Snorkel AI Highlights First Wave of Open Benchmarks Grants Projects

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SAN FRANCISCO, July 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Snorkel AI today highlighted the first group of projects supported through Open Benchmarks Grants, a $3 million commitment to support open-source datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation research.

Launched in February 2026, Open Benchmarks Grants has received hundreds of applications from researchers, labs, and engineers working to address a growing challenge: AI systems are advancing faster than the field’s ability to rigorously measure their performance on realistic, consequential work.

“From complex environments and huge autonomy horizons to rich, sophisticated outputs, these projects tackle some of the field’s hardest evaluation challenges,” said Fred Sala, a member of the Open Benchmarks Grants steering committee and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “I’m excited to see the broader research community use, validate, and build on them.”

Open Benchmarks Grants provides selected teams with funding, expert data development support, research and engineering collaboration, and platform resources. Supported projects include:

Frontier-Bench (formerly Terminal-Bench 3.0), developed with Laude Institute and the Harbor community, is a harder, more domain-diverse successor to Terminal-Bench 2.1 — built in the open, task by task, under continuous adversarial review.Agents’ Last Exam, developed with UC Berkeley RDI and the RDI Foundation, evaluates agents on long-horizon, economically valuable professional workflows. It spans 55 sub-industries and includes more than 1,500 tasks toward a 5,000-task target, sourced and validated by more than 300 industry experts.OSWorld 2.0, developed with XLANG Lab, evaluates computer-use agents on 108 long-horizon workflows across 31 self-hosted web environments and professional desktop applications.Continual Learning Bench, developed with UC Berkeley SkyLab and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, measures whether agents genuinely improve across sequential, stateful tasks.SlopCode Bench, developed with the University of Wisconsin–Madison, measures how code quality degrades as coding agents repeatedly modify and extend their own solutions.Terminal-Bench 2.1, developed with Stanford University, Laude Institute and the Harbor community, evaluates agents on challenging work in terminal environments. The release corrected 28 tasks and introduced continuous validation.

With support from Open Benchmarks Grants, Terminal-Bench Science is also now in development, extending the Terminal-Bench framework to computational research workflows across the life, physical, earth, and mathematical sciences.

Beyond the grants program, Snorkel led the development of Senior SWE-Bench with the research teams at Princeton University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The benchmark evaluates coding agents on senior-level engineering work, including implementing features from realistic instructions, investigating bugs that require runtime analysis, and producing code that follows existing codebase conventions.

Open Benchmarks Grants was established with support from Hugging Face, Prime Intellect, Together AI, Factory, Harbor, and PyTorch. Applications remain open and are reviewed on a rolling basis.

Learn more and apply for a grant at benchmarks.snorkel.ai.

About Snorkel AI
Snorkel AI is the frontier AI data lab, helping teams build the data and environments behind high-performing frontier and agentic AI. We combine technology with research-driven AI data development to create datasets, benchmarks, evals, and custom solutions for real-world AI systems. Founded out of the Stanford AI Lab in 2019, Snorkel works with leading AI labs and enterprises to move from better data to better outcomes. 

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Payzli Vaults to No. 3 on Tampa Bay’s Fast 50, Up From No. 22 in One Year

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Payments technology company, Payzli earns a second consecutive Fast 50 ranking, crediting the climb to accelerating partner and merchant growth on its proprietary technology stack.

TAMPA, Fla., July 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Payzli, the partner-first payments technology company, has been named the No. 3 fastest-growing company in the region on the Tampa Bay Business Journal’s 2026 Fast 50 – a 19-spot climb from its No. 22 debut last year, and the company’s second consecutive year on the list.

The ranking was announced July 23 at the Tampa Bay Business Journal’s Fast 50 event in Tampa, where Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer Naim Hamdar accepted the award alongside members of the Payzli team.

Payzli attributed its growth to a compounding effect: a national network of ISOs, agents and ISVs bringing merchants onto a technology platform Payzli built and operated in-house. 

That platform rests on three proprietary pillars:

Payzli Connect: the company’s payment CRM and merchant-and-partner dashboard, giving agents and ISOs daily residuals visibility and giving merchants a single place to run their account.Payzli POS: AI-powered point-of-sale and business software purpose-built for service businesses, including salons, med spas, wellness studios, and independent operators.Payzli Transact: an online payment gateway built on Visa Platform Connect through Payzli’s partnership with Visa Acceptance Solutions.

The Visa Acceptance Solutions partnership is central to how Payzli frames its credibility: rather than assembling a growth story on top of borrowed infrastructure, the company processes on rails backed by one of the most established networks in the industry alongside Fiserv and TSYS – a point that matters to the partners and merchants deciding where to place their volume.

“A second year on this list, and a jump to No. 3, isn’t about one good quarter. It’s about a network deciding to build with us and stay,” said Naim Hamdar, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Payzli. “Every rank on this list represents partners we’ve earned and merchants who trust us to run their payments. We built the technology in-house so we could keep the promises the industry usually breaks: nothing hidden, a real person in reach, and daily residual visibility our agents can actually count on. That’s what this ranking measures and it’s why we’re doing it all, for the joy of business.”

“They say nothing in Tampa moves fast except the afternoon thunderstorms, so making the Fast 50 two years running feels pretty good,” said Kapil Pershad, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Payzli. “In all seriousness, this is a credit to our team and the businesses that trust us to power their growth.”

The Fast 50, produced by the Tampa Bay Business Journal, recognizes the fastest-growing private companies in the Tampa Bay region. Payzli’s return to the list and its move into the top three reflects a merchant-first product suite and a rapidly expanding national partner network across the payments and embedded-finance landscape.

About Payzli

Payzli is an end-to-end payments technology partner that makes accepting payments simpler and affordable for businesses of all sizes and risk levels. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Tampa, Florida, Payzli brings together in-person processing, an advanced online gateway, AI-powered point of sale, and mobile and contactless payments – backed by its own technology, honest pricing, and dedicated human support. Built partner-first, Payzli equips ISOs, agents, developers, and independent software vendors to grow, with direct integrations to major processing platforms, in-house underwriting, a flexible credit policy, a Visa Acceptance Solutions foundation partnership, and sponsor-bank backing from Esquire Bank, a NASDAQ-listed strategic investor in Payzli. For more information, email partners@payzli.com or visit payzli.com.

Payzli is a registered trademark of United Payment Systems LLC. United Payment Systems LLC is a registered ISO of Esquire Bank (Jericho, NY), Commercial Bank of California (Irvine, CA), and KeyBank, National Association (Cleveland, OH).

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