INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Cloudian, a company that enables businesses to store and manage massive amounts of data, announced today the launch of Edgematrix, a new
unit focused on edge analytics for large data sets
Edgematrix, a majority-owned subsidiary of Cloudian, will first be available in Japan, where both companies are based
It has raised a $9 million Series A from strategic investors NTT Docomo, Shimizu Corporation and Japan Post Capital, as well as Cloudian
co-founder and CEO Michael Tso and board director Jonathan Epstein
The funding will be used on product development, deployment and sales and marketing.Cloudian itself has raised a total of $174 million,
including a $94 million Series E round announced last year
Its products include the Hyperstore platform, which allows businesses to store hundreds of petrabytes of data on premise, and software for
data analytics and machine learning
Edgematrix uses Hyperstore for storing large-scale data sets and its own AI software and hardware for data processing at the “edge” of
networks, closer to where data is collected from IoT devices like sensors.The company’s solutions were created for situations where
real-time analytics is necessary
For example, it can be used to detect the make, model and year of cars on highways so targeted billboard ads can be displayed to their
drivers.Tso told TechCrunch in an email that Edgematrix was launched after Cloudian co-founder and president Hiroshi Ohta and a team spent
two years working on technology to help Cloudian customers process and analyze their data more efficiently.“With more and more data being
created at the edge, including IoT data, there’s a growing need for being able to apply real-time data analysis and decision-making at or
near the edge, minimizing the transmission costs and latencies involved in moving the data elsewhere,” said Tso
“Based on the initial success of a small Cloudian team developing AI software solutions and attracting a number of top-tier customers, we
decided that the best way to build on this success was establishing a subsidiary with strategic investors.”Edgematrix is launching in
Japan first because spending on AI systems there is expected to grow faster than in any other market, at a compound annual growth rate of
45.3% from 2018 to 2023, according to IDC.“Japan has been ahead of the curve as an early adopter of AI technology, with both the
governmetn and private sector viewing it as essential to boosting productivity,” said Tso
“Edgematrix will focus on the Japanese market for at least the next year, and assuming that all goes well, it would then expand to North
