Synadia: Securely Connecting Applications and Services at the Edge

Modern distributed systems have more complexity, components and data than ever before. Too many companies rely on inefficient and insecure middleware to connect their growing number of applications and microservices. Legacy solutions are falling further behind as edge computing and the mass adoption of AI (and GenAI) drive advances in computation and data storage. As a result, companies face high overhead costs, high latency, and limited scalability. 

To address these gaps, Derek Collison, a 30+ year career technologist, entrepreneur and veteran in cloud computing with an impressive track record in building secure, large-scale systems, created NATS.io (NATS), an open-source connective technology simplifying messaging and data flows. NATS acts as a backbone that synchronizes disparate technologies across cloud, on-premises, hybrid, and edge environments. A lightweight, performant and zero trust messaging utility, NATS enables lower latency, easier operations and greater scalability in a secure by-design architecture- and is much faster to deploy than legacy solutions, all at 3-4x lower cost of ownership. 

Inspired by the rapid and widespread adoption of NATS by the open-source community across hundreds of leading companies, soon after Derek founded Synadia to help organizations run NATS successfully across multiple clouds, geographies, and devices – at scale, for any environment. Now equipped with an extensible and user-friendly multi-cloud NATS platform complete with an admin portal, API and enterprise support, customers can leverage Synadia and NATS to improve everything from customer personalization at scale and real-time telemetry to product development and industrial automation. As a result, Synadia’s rapidly-growing customer base includes companies like Form3, Replit, Rivian, Philips, and Powerflex – leading brands and pioneers at the forefront of technology across industries – all benefiting from the fastest and most efficient means of securely harnessing data at the edge for applications and microservices. (Some of my favorite success stories include real-time racing data for motorsports and groundbreaking advancements in renewable energy.)  

Today, I am proud to congratulate Synadia on their $25M Series B financing round led by Forgepoint Capital with the participation of SingTel Innov8, LDVP, and 5G Open Innovation Lab.   

When I first met Synadia, I was impressed by Derek’s compelling vision for connected adaptive edge and the company’s collaborative, technical team. Derek’s background includes leadership roles at Google and VMware in addition to founding cloud infrastructure company Apcera. His deep expertise and passion for pioneering new technologies inform Synadia’s core mission to connect all applications and data. He and other members of the team share roots in leadership roles at TIBCO (now merged with Citrix to form Cloud Software Group) where they created and scaled next-generation application and data integration, messaging and event processing technologies. 

Highly scalable and resilient, NATS also implements zero trust principles and provides decentralized security. It can add value to cybersecurity stacks by connecting disparate security logs for edge and cluster analytics, increasing observability to enhance passive and active defenses. As an enabler of edge computing, NATS can also help companies process data closer to the source, strengthening data security and minimizing attack surfaces.  

Forgepoint believes that Synadia has the right team, technology, model, timing and impact to scale globally as it targets a massive, burgeoning market. In the venture world, investors look for better, faster, cheaper solutions that outperform incumbents with a decisive advantage: the raw talent, vision and motivation to succeed. Not only is NATS faster, better and cheaper than competitive platforms in hyper growth edge computing and multi-cloud markets driven by AI, it is built for edge expansion with additional growth opportunities in servicing IoT, web and mobile verticals. Synadia’s seasoned, expert team brings the foresight and commitment to empower its customers to build well into the future.  

On behalf of all of us at Forgepoint Capital, we are excited to support Synadia as they develop NATS into the definitive intelligent layer that connects applications and services. We look forward to working with the team as they enter their next phase of growth and beyond.