A new company created by two former Akamai employees has just emerged from stealth. IO River is a CDN designed to serve content from multiple edge platforms.
The founders, Edward Tsinovoi and Michael Hakimi, have raised $5.4 million in seed funding from S Capital along with smaller investments from Aryeh Mergi, Ronni Zehavi, and more.
According to IO River, the CDN market today consists of just a few major players, and this can cause issues because when one of them goes down, it leads to widespread outages for all the websites relying on those vendors. As a result of problems in the past, many companies have begun exploring the idea of using multiple edge networks to serve content instead of a single CDN.
This has its benefits, but also results in a lot of overhead because it requires companies to manage each service separately.
The idea behind IO River is to provide a single platform for managing these many edge platforms. Companies can bring their existing providers into the IO River dashboard as well as easily add new ones. It supports the major CDN providers, including Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, Edgio, AWS CloudFront, and more.
“The largest content providers in the world don’t rely on a single content delivery network,” said Michael Hakimi, co-founder and CTO of IO River. “They use multiple edge vendors, managed by fancy in-house tools to improve cost and performance. We wanted to bring that capability to everyone.”
Using IO River, companies can easily choose which edge network to use for specific users, optimizing performance based on user location, type of traffic, and other factors.
The solution also offers features such as a web application firewall (WAF), rate limiting, traffic control, and edge computing.
It ensures 99.999% uptime, 50% improved performance, and 40% reduced delivery costs, according to the company.
“Every edge provider has its unique benefits,” said Edward Tsinovoi, co-founder and CEO of IO River. “But customers should be able to take advantage of all of the benefits without being locked into a single provider. IO River gives organizations the best blend of speed, reliability and cost, all in one place in a simple, single context that lets organizations run multiple edge networks as if they were managing just one.”
