edge-computing
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Permutive Wants Publishers to Sell What They Know
Publishers know their readers. Too often, somebody else gets paid for that knowledge. Permutive is building the software to change the transaction - and now wants AI agents to handle more of the work.
Petrolink wants your oilfield to speak one language
A drilling operation can drown in data and still struggle to make a decision. Petrolink’s bet is that getting everyone onto the same feed can save money before the clever analytics even begin.
The AI Boom Has a Heat Problem. Vertiv Built the Plumbing.
AI chips get the headlines. Vertiv sells the power, liquid cooling and factory-built infrastructure that determines whether those chips can actually run - and its $15 billion backlog shows how physical the digital boom has become.
Qu Is Rebuilding the Restaurant Stack Around the Moment the Wi-Fi Dies
The restaurant-tech company won enterprise chains by treating downtime, menu sprawl and disconnected orders as one systems problem. Now it is turning that plumbing into an AI and payments business.
EPIC iO Bet the Camera Was Never the Point
The Fort Mill company is stitching cameras, sensors and wireless links into one operating layer for remote sites - a useful idea whose economics depend less on magical AI than on good placement, clean signals and humans who still make the call.
Fastly Put the Internet on Fast-Forward. Then One Customer Found the Brake.
Fastly made a business of shaving milliseconds from the web and giving developers unusual control over the edge. Its biggest outage showed the bargain hiding inside that speed - and its recovery offers a practical playbook for anyone building critical infrastructure.
The Software Company You Notice Only When Everything Goes Wrong
Wind River put an operating system on Mars, watched it stumble, and helped patch it from Earth. Four decades later, its business still rests on the same promise: make complicated machines behave when the deadline is literal.
DataCore’s 28-Year Bet: Your Storage Hardware Isn’t the Product - Control Is
DataCore built a business by telling IT teams to keep the expensive storage they already own. Now, after acquisitions and a Kubernetes push, it is trying to make the same anti-lock-in argument from the data center to the edge.
Blues Put 10 Years of Connectivity in a Tiny Card - So Hardware Teams Can Skip the Telecom Homework
Ray Ozzie’s latest company turns the messiest parts of industrial IoT into a small module and a JSON request. The payoff is speed; the tradeoff is that Blues works best when machines whisper useful data, not when they stream the world.
Able Device Bet the Tiny SIM Card Could Run Your IoT Fleet. Now the Market Is Catching Up.
For 16 years, a nine-person Raleigh company has argued that the most underused computer in telecom is already inside the device. SIMbae turns that overlooked chip into a programmable traffic cop for connected fleets - with no new hardware and far less Java Card work.
Portainer Turned Kubernetes Expertise Into a Button - Now 1 Million Users Want the Shortcut
The Auckland company started by taking the migraines out of Docker. Its bigger business is selling operational control to teams that cannot afford to make every employee a Kubernetes expert.
Xeal’s Contrarian Bet: The Best EV Charger Is the One That Ignores the Internet
After its first connected chargers stranded drivers and drew hate mail, Xeal spent two years moving the transaction off the cloud. The result is a real-estate-first charging business built for the place Wi-Fi goes to die: the parking garage.
The Colorado Startup Teaching Your Phone to Diet on Netflix
Video eats the wireless network alive. A husband-and-wife team on Colorado's Western Slope built AI that puts it on a diet - on the device, before it ever clogs the tower.
MaiaEdge Wants to Turn the Internet’s ‘Big Middle’ Into a Push-Button Business
Private connectivity still gets negotiated by spreadsheet and activated on telecom time. MaiaEdge’s hardware-and-software bet is that operators can turn months of coordination into minutes - without handing the customer to somebody else.
Ibeos Put CubeSat Economics Into Serious Space Hardware - Then Trident Bought the Factory
The Virginia spacecraft supplier spent 13 years turning radiation-tolerant power, batteries and computers into configurable products. Its March 2026 sale to Trident shows what happens when a small engineering shop makes the least glamorous parts of a satellite easier to buy.
When Heavy Machines Break, Elevāt Makes Them Talk Back
The Seattle startup wires up off-highway equipment - tractors, cranes, fire trucks - and hands technicians an AI that reads the machine's mind before anyone opens the panel.
The Open-Source Company That Quietly Runs Other People's Clouds
It bet on OpenStack, bought Docker Enterprise, and now wants to turn your GPUs into an AI factory - all without locking you in. In August 2026, IREN bought the whole thing for $625 million.
Altizon Gave the Factory Floor a Brain That Talks Back
A Princeton-and-Pune software company spent a decade wiring up shop floors. Now it is betting the most useful worker in the plant will be a piece of software you can talk to.
Blue Pillar Made Old Machines Talk - Then Generac Bought the Conversation
Hospitals, utilities and microgrids were full of useful machines that could not share data. Blue Pillar found a practical business in connecting the awkward old stuff - often in days, sometimes for a few thousand dollars - and became part of Generac in 2022.
The Invisible Tech Company Behind the Beep, Scan and Tap
BlueStar rarely meets the shopper, nurse or warehouse worker who uses its technology. Its business is making sure the scanners, screens, printers and software behind those moments arrive as one workable system.
Lenovo Wants to Own the Journey From Your Pocket to the Cloud
The company that made the black business laptop an office fixture is building a much larger machine - one that sells devices, data-center infrastructure and recurring services as a connected stack.
Intel
The company that built the microprocessor is trying to build something harder: a second act. Inside Intel's bet-the-house pivot from selling chips to making everyone else's.
Akamai Technologies
Akamai began with a pixel hidden on Disney's website. Twenty-seven years later, the network built to beat the 'World Wide Wait' is becoming a security perimeter and an AI cloud - without giving up the pipes that made it matter.
Azion
Azion wants to make the edge feel less like a map of servers and more like a programmable workbench. Its bet: the next important application will be built, secured and observed closer to the people using it.
Arrcus, Inc.
Arrcus wants the network to stop arriving as a sealed appliance. Its software runs across white-box switches, clouds and edge sites - and now the company is betting that AI will make that freedom more valuable.
AiFi Inc.
AiFi began by teaching stores to see a shopping basket without a scanner. Now it wants to make the whole physical world as searchable as the internet - one camera feed, digital twin and disappearing checkout line at a time.
Accton
Accton spent decades building the switches behind other companies’ brands. Now AI has turned that quiet Taiwanese manufacturing playbook into an $8 billion open-infrastructure business - and pulled it from the rack into optics, cooling and compute.
Auk Industries
A Singapore startup wants to be the 'Fitbit for machines' - snapping cheap sensors onto any factory line and turning decades-old equipment into a live data feed in days, not months.
Netmaker
Netmaker is an open-source virtual networking platform built on WireGuard that automates fast, secure, distributed mesh networks across clouds, data centers, edge sites, and devices. Founded by former IBM cloud engineers Alex Feiszli and Dillon Carns, it lets teams stitch together servers, containers, IoT devices, and remote users into a single flat, encrypted network - a kind of VPC for distributed systems. A YC W22 company, Netmaker pairs a widely adopted open-source project with paid Professional and Enterprise editions aimed at businesses and managed service providers.
Unleash live
Unleash live is a Sydney-based enterprise computer vision company that turns live video and imagery from drones, CCTV, IP cameras and mobile devices into real-time, actionable insights. Its cloud and edge platform runs a library of AI models to inspect critical infrastructure - power lines, wind turbines, solar farms, rail, roads and industrial sites - detecting faults, corrosion and equipment wear so utilities, transport authorities and resource companies can inspect assets faster and safer. Alongside the core platform it offers Autofly for automated drone and robot inspections and an AI App marketplace for building and deploying custom vision models.