Edge Delta Secures $15M Series A Funding

Edge Delta Secures $15 Million Series A to Revolutionize Monitoring

Seattle-based Edge Delta, a startup focused on developing a cutting-edge distributed monitoring stack, has announced a $15 million Series A funding round. The company directly challenges established industry leaders such as Splunk, New Relic, and Datadog.

Funding Details and Investors

Menlo Ventures and Tim Tully, formerly the CTO of Splunk, spearheaded the funding round. Existing investors, MaC Venture Capital and Amity Ventures, also contributed, bringing the company’s total funding to $18 million.

The Challenge with Traditional Data Analysis

According to Edge Delta co-founder and CEO Ozan Unlu, the current methods of data analysis are becoming unsustainable. He notes that enterprises are struggling to analyze the ever-increasing volume of data in real time.

“Traditional centralized models are simply overwhelmed by the sheer scale of modern data,” explains Unlu, who brings 15 years of experience in the observability field, including time at Microsoft and Sumo Logic. “What functioned adequately a decade ago, with data measured in gigabytes, is now failing under the weight of terabytes and petabytes.”

Business Intelligence vs. Real-Time Analysis

While acknowledging the effectiveness of big data warehousing for business intelligence and analytics, Unlu emphasizes its limitations for real-time applications. Centralized warehousing necessitates moving large datasets from their point of origin.

Edge Delta proposes a different approach: enabling enterprises to analyze logs, metrics, traces, and telemetry directly at the source. This provides comprehensive visibility into all generated data, unlike many current systems that only offer partial insights.

How Edge Delta Differs from Competitors

Unlike competing services that primarily compress and encrypt data before transmission, Edge Delta’s agent initiates data analysis at the local level.

For instance, to visualize error rates from a Kubernetes cluster, users wouldn’t need to consolidate all data in a warehouse for indexing and analysis. Instead, each node can independently generate its graph, which Edge Delta then aggregates.

This approach delivers substantial performance gains, often by several orders of magnitude, and facilitates running machine learning models directly at the edge.

Industry Veteran Backs Edge Delta’s Vision

Tim Tully of Menlo Ventures, who recently joined the firm after leaving Splunk, highlighted the appeal of Edge Delta’s distributed computing model.

“The ability to move compute to the edge, reduce latency, and perform machine learning in a distributed manner was incredibly fascinating,” Tully stated. He observed a trend of organizations seeking cost control by strategically placing workloads.

Cost Savings and Efficiency

Edge Delta offers a more cost-effective service by minimizing the need for extensive compute resources and storage. While customers still incur costs for provisioning compute power, these expenses are significantly lower than those associated with traditional centralized services.

The company claims a typical 90 percent improvement in total cost of ownership compared to conventional solutions.

Pricing and Competitive Landscape

Edge Delta’s pricing is based on data volume and is openly compared to Splunk’s on its pricing calculator. Splunk is a central point of reference for both Tully and Unlu.

“There’s a clear trend of ‘unbundling Splunk’,” Unlu explained. “Solutions like Snowflake address non-real-time needs, while we focus on the real-time operational use cases and the processing of massive data streams requiring immediate analysis.”

Integration with Existing Systems

Despite the competitive landscape, Edge Delta is designed to integrate with existing services like Splunk, Sumo Logic, AWS’s S3, and others. Data can be ingested through Edge Delta and then forwarded to these platforms.

The Evolution of Edge Computing

Tully reflected on Splunk’s previous attempts to leverage edge computing. “We envisioned building a business around IoT and Splunk at the Edge, but it didn’t fully materialize,” he said. “The concept of the ‘edge’ has evolved, and advances in distributed computing and hardware sophistication now make these solutions viable at a lower cost and with reduced latency.”

Future Plans

The newly acquired funding will be used to expand the Edge Delta team and support its growing customer base. The company is actively building out its go-to-market, marketing, customer success, and support teams.