Macrometa Locks Down $20M To Be The Amazon Prime Of Edge Computing

Palo Alto, California-based edge compute company Macrometa closed a $20 million Series A less than eight months after announcing its $7 million seed funding.

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The round was led by Pelion Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors

DNX Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), Partech Partners, Fusion Fund, Sway Ventures and Shasta Ventures. Founded in 2017, the company has raised $29 million to date.

Macrometa allows developers to build and run data-heavy cloud applications using real-time information and analytics at the edge — speeding up the process by bringing it closer. Co-founder and CEO Chetan Venkatesh compared what Macrometa does for developers in edge computing to what Amazon Prime did for the retail space.

“Amazon Prime created local caches of local goods,” he said. “We are doing the same thing for data and applications.”

In edge compute terms, that means getting developers the data they need faster and in real-time.

“We are big data meets fast data,” he added.

Fast growth

The 62-person company began last year with a few hundreds-of-thousands of dollars in revenue, but by the end of the year saw several millions of dollars in sales, Venkatesh said. It was then he started to think about raising a fresh Series A to help scale up the company.

Chris Cooper, general partner of Pelion, already had expressed interest in leading such a series and jumped at the chance to invest in another infrastructure and cloud-related company — having prior investments in companies like Cloudflare, Red Hat and Riverbed.

“To me, this smelled like and sounded like the thing that helped build our firm,” he said.

Venkatesh said the company will use the money to continue to build its solution and go-to-market strategy. The company expects to grow revenue 3x to 4x this year, and add to its customer base that already includes about a half dozen large enterprises, he said.

Using other forecasts as guidelines, Macrometa estimates the market for data services in the cloud to be about $50 billion. However, many solutions, such as those offered by SAP, Oracle, AWS and Google, are cloud-centric, not edge-native, Venkatesh said.

That difference could help the company dominate an edge compute market just coming into focus, he added.

Cooper said there are aspects of Macrometa that remind him of Cloudflare early on.

“We didn’t know what Cloudflare could truly be back then,” he said “But these are companies that change the way we interact with data.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.