Today, Parisian startup Namla has emerged from stealth mode after raising €1.2 million. The tech innovators are facilitating the smoother deployment of edge computing – regarded as the key to IT evolution in the coming years.
Edge computing, a distributed information technology that brings computation and data storage closer to the sources of data, is shaping current IT developments. By bringing data storage closer to the devices where it’s being gathered, rather than relying on a central location that can be thousands of km away, data won’t suffer latency issues – making processing more efficient.
As tech constantly develops and becomes more sophisticated, edge computing is shaping the next IT revolution. Aiming to facilitate the deployment of edge computing solutions, Namla has just raised a fresh capital investment to emerge out of stealth.
Funding details
The €1.2 million seed round was led by Elaia Partners. Acequia Capital and Aonia Ventures are additional backers, in addition to high-profile angel investors, Sébastien PAHL (co-founder of Docker), Julien LEMOINE (Co-founder & CTO at Algolia), and Thomas WOLF (Co-founder and CSO at Hugging Face).
Sofia Dahoune Partner at Elaia: “Edge computing is one of the emerging revolutionary technologies that will allow businesses to explore new use cases beyond the limitations of traditional cloud-based networks. But so far, technical challenges are slowing down successful edge computing deployments. We believe that Namla will be a major contributor to addressing these challenges thanks to its cloud-edge orchestration and management platform”.
Shaping the future of IT
Based in Paris, Namla was co-founded in 2021 by three young tech innovators: Rabah Guedrez and Imed ALLAL both completed their PhDs in Orange Labs in topics related to SD-WAN, IoT & 5G networks respectively. Younes Khadraoui completed his PhD in IMT Atlantique in topics related to Machine Learning & AI.
After coming together, the three found that edge computing was a link between SD-WAN, IoT and ML technologies – and that it could hold the power to shape the next IT revolution.
Rabah Guedrez CEO and Co-Founder explained: “At Namla, we believe that the edge should not be the stacking of computation, security, and networking hardware. That’s why we’re building a single platform that integrates application, security observability and networking orchestration tailored for the edge to make it as easy and reliable as the cloud is”.
As we live in an increasingly data-dominated world, we need it to be more efficient and more accessible – this means bringing it to the edge. According to a Gartner study, about 75% of all the data traffic generated in 2022 needs to be analyzed at the edge, and this market is estimated to reach €500 billion by 2025.
Namla is pioneering a cloud-native SD-WAN approach to facilitate the deployment of Edge Computing solutions for companies addressing use cases in various sectors such as Industry 4.0, Smart Cities, Healthcare and Automotive.
While 5G deployment is accelerating, telecommunication operators are about to transition from early-stage deployments to wide-scale, global deployments. The 5G technology isn’t “just” about making smartphones faster as many people may think, it’s more about bringing reliable connectivity to enable long-awaited use cases. These use cases include real-time computer vision for Industry 4.0 and Smart Cities (object detection, robot navigation, Automatic inspection, Autonomous vehicles and so forth).
It is therefore critical to shaping the future of society and how we interact.
Taking the founder’s know-how and expertise in network softwarization, IoT and AI, Namla aims to pioneer the edge computing evolution in Europe, and on a global scale. This funding will be used to accelerate platform development, make key hiring decisions and push forward the commercialization of the platform.
Sofia Dahoune, Partner at Elaia: “The team combines excellent technical skills and a very good understanding of the ecosystem, and the market, and we are very excited to support them on their journey”.
