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Read the pitch deck cloud startup Macrometa used to raise a $20 million Series A round to build the ‘Snowflake of the edge’
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- Macrometa used this pitch deck to raise a $20 million Series A, only eight months after its seed round.
- Cofounder Chetan Venkatesh told Insider Macrometa is now aiming to be the “fourth cloud titan.”
- But it needs to work with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google’s clouds in order to make that happen.
Chetan Venkatesh, the cofounder and CEO of Palo Alto-based edge computing startup Macrometa, told Insider last October that the company’s $7 million seed round positioned it to be “the Snowflake of the edge.”
Edge computing, the notion of putting cloud computing resources closer to customers’ devices or locations for better performance, is currently one of the industry’s hottest areas. Combined with the ongoing rollout of 5G networks, which will enable faster speeds with lower latency, edge computing is expected to bring technologies like augmented reality goggles and autonomous vehicles closer to the mainstream than ever before.
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Now, with an infusion of $20 million in Series A funding raised only eight months after its seed round, Venkatesh told Insider that Macrometa is setting its sights higher — with ambitions to become the “fourth cloud titan,” following in the footsteps of leading cloud giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
The Series A, announced on Tuesday, was led by Pelion Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors DNX Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures, Partech Partners, Fusion Fund, Sway Ventures, and Shasta Ventures. This latest round brings Macrometa’s total funding to $29 million. You can read the pitch deck Macrometa used for investors to raise its Series A round, as well as a deck sent to existing investors at the time of the raise, below.
Founded in 2017 by Venkatesh and cofounder Durga Gokina, Macrometa helps customers ensure their data and applications are as close to their endpoints as possible. It has a network of 175 data center sites to make that happen, and Venktaesh says the startup is seeing more interest from developers who are looking ahead of the curve when it comes to building edge-native applications.
“True edge development happens on edge-native architectures that are designed for the next ten years,” Venkatesh said. “We’re seeing a lot of exciting developer adoption, advocacy from customers, as well as users online, who are starting to appreciate how differentiated and powerful this platform is.”
Being a “cloud titan” in Venkatesh’s mind doesn’t mean competing directly against the Big Three. Instead, he hopes the startup’s platform will be “the first bump in the wire, whenever data goes to the cloud where it gets processed.”
Indeed, edge computing is a growing opportunity that analysts like IDC’s Patrick Filkins say more and more startups will go after: filling specialized edge platform gaps the Big Three have yet to fill. “We are seeing smaller startups who specialize in edge platform enablement,” Filkins told Insider. “AWS probably could do that, Azure could do that, but you are absolutely some startups come in and say ‘Hey, we’ll solve what doesn’t exist.”
Macrometa currently has partnerships with telecommunications operators and content delivery network (CDN) providers like Cloudflare, but has yet to land formal partnerships with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google’s clouds, which are critical to its vision.
“We’ve got a very interesting frenemy relationship with all of them right now,” Venkatesh said, “but they’re starting to see that we’re a value-add, not a value-subtract, from how they go to business.”
Still, it was through partnerships like Cloudflare that Macrometa saw a surge in customer demand over the past year, Venkatesh said, spurring the startup to raise its next round so soon after its first. The money is intended to help build out a sales team to “sell to the largest customers in the world,” Venkatesh said.
Read the pitch deck that Macrometa used to raise its $20 million Series A round, as well as the update deck it gave investors at the time of the raise, as shared with Insider:
Macrometa Series A Deck
Macrometa also shared the following deck, which it gave investors at the time of its Series A fundraising, to explain how it raised the round.
Macrometa Investor Update Deck