While working on internet-of-the-things security in the mid-2010s, Alex Zenla realizes something worrying.

Unlike computers and servers who have designated the latest, largest processors, the pointed chips in IOT devices could not support the cloud protection that other computers use to keep them quiet and protected. As a result, most embedded devices are directly linked to the local network, which may have left them more vulnerable to attacks. At the time, Zenla was a wonderful teenager, who worked on IOT platforms and Open Source, and built the community in Minecraft IRC channels. After marveling at the problem for several years, she started working on a technology to make it possible for almost any device to walk in its own isolated cloud, known as a ‘container’. Now, a decade later, she is one of the three female employees of a security company trying to change how cloud infrastructure resources share.

The company, known as Edera, makes Cloud Workload Isolation Tech that may sound like a nish tool, but it aims to address a universal safety problem when many applications or even multiple customers use shared cloud infrastructure. Ever growing AI workload, for example, rely on GPUs for raw processing power instead of standard CPUs, but these chips are designed for maximum efficiency and capacity rather than with handrail to separate and protect different processes. As a result, it is much more likely to turn an attacker who can jeopardize one region of a system from there and gain more access.

“These problems are very difficult, both on the GPU and the insulation of the container, but I think people were due to accepting trade -in that was not actually acceptable,” Zenla says.

After a $ 5 million seed round in October, Edera today announced a series of $ 15 million A led by Microsoft’s Venture Fund, M12. The latest news in granular financing is in itself nothing striking, but Edera’s momentum is striking in light of the current, subdued VC landscape and especially the company’s female founders, which include two transwives.

In the United States and around the world, the funding of companies for technical startups has always been a boys’ club with the vast majority BC dollars going to male founders. Female founders who do receive initial support have a harder time to increase the subsequent rounds than men and have a lot of steep chance to establish another company after one fails. And the windwinds only get stronger as the Trump administration in the US and Big Tech Mount an assault on diversity, fairness and inclusion initiatives intended to raise awareness about these types of realities and promote inclusivity.

“We cannot ignore the fact that we are a small minority in our industry, and that many of the changes around us do not lift us,” says the CEO of Edera and co -founder Emily Long. ‘We are very proud and responsibility to stay at the front of this. Since our foundation, I cannot say how many incredible technical, talented women have proactively asked us to hire them from large institutions. So you begin to see that you are only through existing and different, you show what is possible. “

For Zenla, Long and co -founder Ariadne Conill, who has an extensive background in Open Source software and security, the purpose of developing the isolation technology of Edera is to make it easy (at least relatively speaking) for network engineers and IT -Drers to implement robust and separation over their systems, so that an exploited vulnerability in one piece of network equipment or A rogue insider situation will – and unable to – disastrous mega -break.

“People have legacy applications in their infrastructure and use the end of life software; There is no way to do security and believe that you can always do every existing vulnerability, ”says Long. ‘But it inherently creates a fairly large risk profile. And on top of that, containers were never originally designed to be isolated from each other, so you had to choose between innovation and performance and security, and we don’t want people to do it anymore. ‘