Startups are ushering in a new age of connected cities collecting and processing troves of data at the network's edge — not in the cloud.
Edge computing is the key to enabling smart cities.
In the future, the data required for many smart city innovations will need to be processed on the edge of the network instead of in the cloud. In other words, this means devices will make decisions on their own rather than always communicating with centralized cloud resources. This should reduce latency and improve security.
Smart city innovations such as autonomous urban transportation will be especially reliant on edge-computing capabilities.
A self-driving car has to be able to process its environment and make real-time life or death decisions in a split second — it can’t wait for the cloud to answer back. Similarly, the billions of IoT devices that will make up smart city networks have to be able to communicate securely and seamlessly with one another to efficiently manage city-wide resources.
We used the CB Insights database to surface 6 notable startups building edge computing solutions targeting the smart city. Companies were selected based on recency of funding, investor quality, and Mosaic Score — CB Insights’ algorithm that uses financial and nonfinancial signals to predict private company health.
