Why we invested in Edgeworx
Today Edgeworx, one of our newest portfolio companies, came out of stealth and announced their funding. We’re excited to share the news and look forward to seeing more companies adopt their open source ioFog platform.
At Samsung NEXT, we see data exploding at a exponential rate, and believe more systems will need to move toward computing at the edge. These systems will require a new way of thinking about how to manage them.
Edgeworx fits perfectly into this thesis: It is solving hard technical problems for operating robust and manageable systems where logic can be running at the edge. It’s doing that by offering a flexible, secure, and convenient way for organizations operating Industrial IoT devices to easily collect and analyze data from those operations.
Data generated at the edge could drive real value for industrial IoT operators, but very little of it is actually being used today. As more devices come online, that problem will accelerate. According to a McKinsey study, there will be as many as 30 billion IoT devices in the field by 2020, but today’s infrastructure can’t support the massive amount of data they will produce.
The solution is to move more data collection and analysis to the edge devices themselves, rather than sending data to the cloud for processing. Today, most solutions promise "real-time analytics" and control at the cloud or data center network edge, but they merely provide data aggregation and event filtering capabilities near the source of data generation, mostly using gateways.
That’s how Edgeworx is different. Its technology was designed from the ground up to be the infrastructure layer for edge devices, and to interface with legacy systems and cloud and data center so easily that it appears native to other systems.
Edgeworx enables customers to run real software on practically any device, regardless of compute and resources. And it lets them do so with the same level of security and remote control as they would expect from today’s cloud and data center infrastructure.
With Edgeworx, nobody has to change anything about how they write, package, or deploy software to run at the edge. Their existing libraries, frameworks, models, and packages can simply be packaged to run at the edge, reducing the time to begin ROI-generating operations.
It can do this for systems with many hundreds or thousands of devices in the field, even in the face of spotty networks or heterogeneous physical environments. Edgeworx’s solution has the potential to solve not just a particular industry vertical, but to meet tech and product needs across industries.
While we were impressed by the technical aspects of what Edgeworx has built, we were more impressed by the founding team. Kilton has been working on what is now ioFog for years on his own previous to founding Edgeworx. His approach is novel, pragmatic, and thoughtful. Farah is a particularly savvy businessperson with a great blend of technical background, enterprise business experience, and startup investing.
We’re excited to be working with them and look forward to seeing what comes next. Congrats to Kilton, Farah, and the rest of the Edgeworx team!