OpenView Leads $14.4M Series B in balena to Bring Edge Computing into the Mainstream

Edge computing is everywhere. It’s in the headlines covering drones, robotics and autonomous driving as well as hiding in plain sight powering digital signage, building management systems and logistics automation. At OpenView, we see the edge as the next major computing paradigm after mobile and cloud and are excited to announce that we led a $14.4M investment in balena, the developer platform for the edge.

Unlike in mature ecosystems such as mobile and cloud, launching an application on the edge requires rebuilding fundamental infrastructure, both hardware and software, before being able to write the first line of application specific code. Managing that application can require going on-site, possibly getting on a plane before being able to troubleshoot. Put another way, it would be like needing to build out data-center infrastructure at a potential customer site every time someone wanted to try to write a new software application. Not impossible, but a substantial undertaking compared to spinning up resources on the public cloud. As a result, over 75% of IoT projects fail and edge development has been restricted to the 2.5% of global developers familiar with embedded systems.

Balena turns these statistics on their head by enabling any web or mobile developer to build for the edge and is seeing more than 70% of developers who succeed in pushing code to a device do it within a day. The core balena platform, balenaCloud, encompasses device, server and client-side software, all designed to get code securely deployed on the edge. Rather than asking developers to learn embedded systems, balena enables them to use the same container-based workflows they are familiar with from developing and managing cloud systems. More broadly, balena offers a complete set of tools for building, deploying and managing edge applications and the devices they run on. From prototype to production, the next generation of edge applications are being built on balena.

Balena believes that great talent is found anywhere, regardless of location. Embracing a remote-first culture, the balena team is distributed across the world with team members located in over 20 countries. With this new infusion of capital, balena will invest in finding the right people anywhere in the world to grow and build the product offering and to help raise awareness of balena to developers who are looking to build for the edge. Learn more about their open positions here.

Balena’s co-founders, Alex Marinos and Petros Angelatos, built balena to answer a single question: “What do mainstream developers need to succeed on the edge?” Five years later, we couldn’t be more excited to partner with them and the broader balena team as they catalyze a new age in edge computing.