Content delivery networks (CDNs) have changed. These were platforms for efficiently distributing static files and little else. But these days, virtually all CDN services add things like edge computing services and security tools on top of their core delivery network. As a result, it has become more difficult for users to switch between CDNs and choose the fastest or most cost-effective option depending on where they serve.
IO River, which launched from stealth today and announced a $5.4 million seed funding round led by S Capital, is building a new CDN to simplify switching between CDNs without being limited to lowest common denominator features. I'm building layers.
It may come as no surprise that IO River was launched by two industry veterans. Co-founders Edward Tsinovoi (CEO) and Michael Hakimi (CTO) founded his IO River in late 2022, with whom he worked together for more than a decade, including at Akamai's Tel Aviv office, before joining the Intel Ignite accelerator program. I did.
Image credit: IO River
“Currently, many online services companies are tied to a single edge vendor or CDN vendor,” Tsinovoi said. “This dependency has a significant impact on resiliency, performance, and cost efficiency. Top enterprise companies do not want to be dependent on a single edge vendor. They are already moving to a multi-CDN, multi-edge platform architecture. However, deploying and maintaining an architecture with multiple edge vendors is complex and expensive. At IO River, our goal is to make this achievable for everyone. ”
IO River provides the core services you would expect from a multi-CDN platform: splitting traffic between providers to optimize uptime, performance, and cost, and a unified management console. All of this is relatively simple, and IO River provides native APIs for basic functionality common to all CDNs (such as redirecting URLs).
Running applications and computing services at the edge adds complexity. After all, CDN services don't have much in common since they aren't strictly meant to work together. What IO River does is provide unique application services such as web application firewalls, rate limiting, and origin load balancing. But perhaps most importantly, it also provides a unified edge computing platform that allows users to run the same code on all these different platforms without making any changes.
First, users can import existing CDN provider settings and add new providers on the fly. Since IO River constantly monitors the performance of various networks, it also provides a detailed set of analytics. This allows users to see which network should be used in a particular location, and to set automatic rules to switch networks when a problem occurs.
The service's enterprise platform currently supports Akamai, Cachefly, Cloudflare, Cloudfront, Edgio, EdgeNext, CDNetworks, Fastly, and GCore. There is also a free version, but this is limited to 1 billion hits per month and does not support advanced features such as global rate limiting, unified origin load balancing, or IO River's unified edge computing service.
“Internet-based companies live and die by content distribution,” said Haim Sadger, co-founding partner at S Capital. “If a site is down for just a few minutes, or the content is slow and unreliable, sales start to drop. But equally, with increasing financial pressures, data costs are becoming a large part of business spending. The traditional approach of using a CDN does not solve all these problems. IO River offers a modern solution that meets the needs of the market and allows Edward and Michael to distribute their Internet content to the world. We look forward to investing in our deep expertise and understanding of how to do this.”