- The startup, founded by Akamai vets, provides a vendor-neutral platform that orchestrates multiple edge networks into a single system
- IO River says it allows enterprises to avoid vendor lock-in and achieve five-nines availability
- The Beantown business scored a $20 million series A funding round
IO River wants to shake up the Content Distribution Network (CDN) market by releasing organizations from lock-in to a single provider, which can lead to outages, high costs and limited performance. The Boston-based startup announced Wednesday it scored a $20 million Series A funding round to fuel that mission .
Founded by veterans of Akamai, Dell and other infrastructure providers, IO River is building a virtual platform designed to be a simple, neutral layer that lets enterprises use multiple edge networks as a single system with AI-based traffic steering and observability.
Notably, the company's platform can provide multi-CDN orchestration for services like Akamai, Cloudflare and Fastly. Those CDN services bundle delivery, security and compute into closed ecosystems controlled by a specific vendors. By adding a virtual layer tying those services together, enterprises can choose between multiple providers and extend their network reach and achieve five nines of availability, IO River CEO Edward Tsinovoi told Fierce.
IO River also provides services such as Web Application Firewall (WAF), bot protection, rate limiting and edge computing.
The company pitched its solution as a simpler alternative to big enterprises having to hire teams of engineers to build multi-CDN orchestration in-house. "For the majority of enterprises, this level of investment simply isn't feasible," the company said in a statement to Fierce.
Internet backbone
Launched three years ago, IO River has tens of customers, including broadcasters and over-the-top (OTT) media publishers and gaming companies, delivering more than 200 petabytes of traffic monthly. Other clients include Minute Media, publishers of Sports Illustrated; gaming company Playtika; French multinational hospitality company Accor; and Axinom, which is partnering with United Airlines and Starlink to improve in-flight video service. IO River plans to expand its customer base to software-as-a-service providers and other "web verticals" — companies providing dynamic, API-driven services, Tsinovoi said.
CDNs are the backbones of Internet business, evolving from their roots in the 90s as delivery networks for video and audio, to today where banking, retail, travel and hospitality — all industries — rely on CDNs to bring content close to users, Tsinovoi said.
These days, CDNs have evolved into edge providers running applications and are becoming even more important with the emergence of AI. While AI training happens in data centers, inference — putting AI to work — happens at the edge, Tsinovoi said.
"We are facing a tsunami of content that should be distributed and delivered around the world," Tsinovoi said. "However, the industry that is responsible for delivering this content is still rooted in the mindset of the 90s."
He added, "If you're choosing to deliver all your traffic through only a single edge provider, you have a single point of failure, and your service is 100% dependent on the availability of those platforms."
The company cited outages at AWS, Cloudflare and Microsoft Azure as evidence of the risk of single-provider dependence.
Telco opportunity
For telcos and other communication service providers, IO River presents opportunities to provide their own CDN services more globally, beyond those providers' regional footprints, Tsinovoi said.
IO River founders are Tsinovoi and CTO Michael Hakimi. Tsinovoi is former director of engineering at Akamai, scaling the business to $100 million annual run rate. He previously worked at Dell. Hakimi is also an Akamai and Dell alum; at Akamai, he was core platform and engineering lead.
The Series A round was led by Venture Guides and New Era, with participation from Edge Capital and private investors, following a seed round of $5.4 million.
IO River faces enormous opportunity, said Andy Ellis, CEO and principal of Duha, which consults with vendors and VC funds on marketing, product ideation and design. Ellis is a veteran of Akamai and is familiar with IO River's work.
"The demand for this is massive," Ellis said. "Almost every enterprise has a mandate to avoid vendor lock-in, but they mostly nibble around the edges in the CDN world, because they can’t afford the integration hassle."
Ellis added, "That’s also their biggest downside; getting people to believe that it’s finally an option to balance traffic on multiple CDNs."