Former Akamai engineers are behind startup IO River, which is developing an edge platform that creates a virtualization layer across multiple CDN providers.
There is no shortage of CDN and edge providers in the market today, but more often than not, choosing one provider can lead to platform lock-in.
That’s the challenge that IO River aims to solve. Today, the Boston-based startup announced that it has closed a $20 million Series A funding round. The money will be used to accelerate deployment of its multi-edge platform that decouples infrastructure from application services across content delivery networks. The startup, founded by former Akamai core platform engineers, is addressing enterprise demand for CDN redundancy and flexibility following major outages at AWS, Cloudflare and Azure over the past year.
IO River currently processes more than 200 petabytes monthly across multiple edge providers for paying customers in streaming, gaming, retail and SaaS.
“We are disrupting the edge market,” Edward Tsinovoi, CEO and co-founder of IO River, told Network World. “We are changing the way customers will consume the edge technology.
The CDN problem that IO River aims to solve
Tsinovoi led Akamai’s core platform organization before founding IO River, where he came to the realization that there is a CDN risk that needs to be mitigated.
Major CDN providers bundle delivery infrastructure with application-layer services including web application firewalls, bot management and edge compute. This creates operational risk. Application service updates can trigger cascading failures that take down the entire infrastructure network.
At one point during Tsinovoi’s tenure at Akamai, the decision was made to freeze all network development for a full year after Akamai experienced multiple outages in a single quarter. The engineering team had capacity to innovate, but the risk of any change outweighed potential benefits, he recalled.
Cloudflare has also suffered its share of recent outages including a firewall incident in December. The pattern is consistent: CDN providers that bundle infrastructure with rapidly evolving application services create fragility in the foundational layer that must remain stable. Tsinovoi said that he has had daily customer conversations about redundancy requirements since Cloudflare’s December outage.
“We must go and have a redundancy edge. We cannot continue to rely on a single vendor anymore,” he said, characterizing the current customer sentiment.
How IO River’s multi-edge platform works
IO River doesn’t have its own CDN or edge infrastructure. Rather, the platform creates a virtual layer that sits above heterogeneous CDN infrastructure as a sort of overlay.
The architecture addresses a fundamental compatibility problem: Edge platforms from Akamai, Cloudflare and Fastly all use different underlying runtime environments. Code written for Fastly won’t necessarily execute on Cloudflare without modification.
The IO River platform leverages WebAssembly and JavaScript as the execution layer on edge networks. Customers write microservices once in JavaScript or WebAssembly. IO River’s virtualization layer handles the runtime environment differences and distributes that code across multiple edge platforms.
“We are leveraging the existing physical networks, like Akamai, CloudFlare, Fastly and AWS, but we are also leveraging their edge compute,” Tsinovoi said. “On top of that, we provide a virtual layer of edge compute. So customers write their codes once and it will be distributed and run on these different platforms.”
The architecture integrates with existing Kubernetes deployments at the origin. In most cases, Kubernetes clusters run in regional data centers and serve as the origin for CDN networks. IO River positions itself as the edge layer in front of those Kubernetes clusters.
Security services decouple from CDN infrastructure
The same virtualization layer that handles edge compute also addresses security services.
Traditional CDN providers tend to bundle their proprietary security stacks with infrastructure. This creates a specific operational problem for enterprises running multi-CDN architectures, according to Tsinovoi.
“If you split your traffic between Akamai and Fastly, you will have one WAF engine on Akamai, another WAF engine on Fastly, they will not be identical,” Tsinovoi said. “Some traffic will pass from one and will be blocked by the second one.”
IO River solves this through partnerships with independent security vendors including Check Point, Palo Alto Networks and Imperva. These vendors’ security services run on IO River’s virtualization layer and operate consistently across all underlying CDN platforms.
Positioning for edge AI and compute workloads
With the new funding, IO River is looking to grow and tackle the demand for emerging edge AI and compute requirements. Major CDN providers are integrating AI services into their platforms. IO River’s virtualization layer allows customers to access these capabilities from multiple providers without vendor lock-in.
The company is targeting larger enterprise deployments while expanding its security capabilities stack. By separating infrastructure from services, Tsinovoi noted that his company enables both regional CDN providers and specialized security vendors to participate in global content delivery markets previously dominated by vertically integrated players.
“We’ve built a Multi-Edge platform that brings the architectural power once reserved for the enterprises of the world to everyone else,” Tsinovoi said.
IO River at a glance
- Founded: 2022
- Funding: $20 million Series A (total $25.4 million raised including seed round)
- Investors: Series A led by Venture Guides and New Era, with participation from S Capital and private investors including Ofir Ehrlich and Pavel Gurvich
- Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts
- CEO: Edward Tsinovoi
- What they do: Multi-edge platform that creates a virtualization layer across multiple CDN providers.
