SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)- Expanso, the distributed compute company based in Seattle, Washington has secured a strategic investment from Samsung Next that signals big ambitions to transform how data is being managed and processed worldwide. Expanso, founded in early 2023 by tech veteran and former Kubernetes Product Lead David Aronchick, announced today that it has closed financing from Samsung Next, the South Korean electronics giant’s venture capital arm. The partnership underscores Expanso’s ambition to bring its distributed workload and data management technology to millions of users globally. The company had previously raised 7.5 million in their seed round in November 2023.
“Samsung is a global company with products and services that span every aspect of customer’s lives. Teaming up with Samsung Next is a no-brainer, and is core to our mission of tackling those pervasive data challenges,” said David Aronchick, CEO of Expanso. “Our role is more about bridging gaps and enabling our customers to freely choose how and where to handle their varied workloads, all while ensuring they maintain full control over their data.”
With Bacalhau, the open-source platform being developed by Expanso, users can run workloads reliably across various environments, including cross-region, cross-cloud, on IoT, and edge devices, and even on unreliable networks. Their intelligent platform can reliably schedule workloads based on where customers need to execute them, with automatic queuing and rescheduling, audit logs, user authentication and authorizations, and will notify users on successful job executions. Additionally, this capability is perfect for handling vast amounts of data and therefore extends to deploying ML models to edge devices. Paired with appropriate hardware, these models become more accurate and efficient, broadening the applications for edge ML.
Expanso is gaining traction and establishing key partnerships with major companies. Their orchestration platform, particularly recognized for its application in edge machine learning, has been acknowledged by Intel and VMware. They achieved success by winning VMware’s TECHCOnnect showcase, being highlighted at VMware’s MWC booth, and presenting their solution at Intel’s AI Summit. Furthermore, they recently received the 2024 Data Breakthrough Award as the “Data Processing Solution of the Year.
Expanso’s strategy to enhance existing data management solutions by improving data processing’s interoperability and efficiency is a key differentiator in a crowded market. It tackles significant issues organizations face, like high costs, data silos and integration challenges, aligning with the shift towards more flexible tech ecosystems. By enabling workloads to run locally, Expanso is not only addressing privacy and latency issues but is also unlocking new opportunities for real-time analytics and decision-making in fields such as autonomous vehicles, industrial automation, and healthcare. In a time when data privacy laws are tightening, Expanso’s focus on data protection and compliance is particularly relevant and its feature to enable collaborative data analytics and ML model training without sharing raw data addresses privacy and regulatory demands, potentially setting a new standard for responsible data usage across industries.
The investment by Samsung Next has the potential to both financially and strategically accelerate Expanso’s growth. Samsung’s global reach and expertise in hardware, particularly in areas relevant to edge computing and IoT devices, combined with Expanso’s software capabilities, present a powerful synergy. With Samsung Next’s backing adding to previous investments by General Catalyst, Hetz Ventures, and Array Venture Capital, Expanso is strategically tackling modern data management challenges through a unified platform that spans cloud services, geographical regions, on-premises infrastructure, IoT, and edge computing – even over unreliable networks. Its commitment to interoperability, privacy, and compliance sets it apart in the market. For tech leaders and investors, Expanso stands out as an innovative new player with significant potential for strategic partnerships, embodying a progressive perspective on technology development and deployment. Expanso’s industry recognition and awards, like the 2024 Data Breakthrough Award, highlights its potential as an emerging leader in the tech sector.
