IT VIEW

Strong brands in automation technology

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by Ian Smith, CEO, and Joseph Moster, chief technology officer. The two have more than 20 years of combined experience in the use of drones in the enterprise and have assembled a team of logistics and technology professionals.

Ware is an enterprise-level supply chain digitization platform positioned at the intersection of robotics and machine learning. The company’s first product uses drones to transform how the $1.9 trillion global warehousing and distribution center market tracks inventory. Ware deploys fleets of smart, self-flying drones from partner Skydio inside customers' facilities to help them track their inventory up to 40 times faster, with 50% fewer dedicated people.

“We help them realize savings of $1 million or more per year by helping reduce losses and spoilage,” said Smith.

According to Smith and Moster, automating warehouse cycle counts with Ware is a 3-step process: • Data capture: Self-flying, autonomous drones operate inside the warehouse, avoiding obstacles and capturing images of inventory. • Data processing: Images are uploaded from the facility to Ware for analysis, barcodes are scanned, and inventory locations are identified. • Report Delivery: Inventory reports are delivered in Ware Cloud. The software’s dashboard displays an artificial intelligence-assisted visual audit log of the warehouse’s inventory, prioritizing issues that require attention.

Ware’s most recent venture funding round was $2.5 million led by UP.Partners, including participation from Bloomberg Beta, 2048 Ventures, and Adam Bry, CEO of Skydio.

Focusing on automation providers, machine builders, and industrial end users, Zededa offers what it calls a “simple and scalable cloud-based orchestration solution that delivers visibility, control, and security for distributed edge computing.” The company says this gives “customers the freedom to deploy and manage any app on any hardware at hyperscale while connecting to any cloud or on-premises systems.”

Zededa’s system use the open-source EVE-OS from the Linux Foundation’s LF Edge organization to provide an open, flexible, and secure foundation and eliminate vendor lock-in. The company says its infrastructure foundation provides a “consistent experience when deploying edge applications for use cases such as OEE, predictive maintenance, quality control, and logistics. Its support for applications deployed in virtual machines enables operators to consolidate workloads by running legacy Windows-based apps (e.g., SCADA, HMI, historian) alongside modern applications (e.g., artificial intelligence/ machine learning) in containers.”

A key aspect of Zededa’s edge technology is its use of the zero-trust security model to segment layered OT (operations technology) control networks from IT systems with distributed firewall capabilities. The technology reportedly supports any edge hardware and application format, compared to others that typically only support Docker containers. The zero-trust security model features siliconbased root of trust, a crypto-based ID that eliminates local device login credentials, measured boot, remote attestation, and full disk encryption. This combination of capabilities is said to ensure device integrity, detect anomalies in the software stack, and govern data flow from edge to cloud with a policy-based distributed firewall. Compliance requirements are met via centralized management with rolebased access control.

Zededa’s founders—Said Ouissal, Roman Shaposhnik, and Erik Nordmark—founded the company to help users deal with the unprecedented amount of data now generated at the edge of the network and via the internet. They determined that the only way companies could reasonably deal with all this data would be to move the analytics and inference to the edge where the data are generated, as it would be too expensive and time consuming to upload all of this data to the cloud and analyze it there.

To date, Zededa has raised $31.5 million from principal investors such as Lux Capital, Energize Ventures, Almaz Capital, Rockwell Automation, Juniper Networks, EDF North America Ventures, and HBAM. Zededa currently has more than 20 customers in the manufacturing, oil and gas, and energy industries.