Content delivery networks (CDNs) have changed. They used to be platforms for efficient delivery of static files — and nothing else. These days, however, almost every CDN service adds cutting-edge computing services, security tools, and more on top of the basic delivery networks. As a result, it becomes more difficult for users to switch between CDNs and choose the fastest or most cost-effective option for the sites they serve.
River IOwhich is launching out of stealth today and is announcing a $5.4 million funding round led by S Chapterit creates a layer on top of CDNs to simplify switching between them without being limited to lowest common denominator features.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, IO River was launched by two industry veterans. Co-founders Edward Tsinovoi (CEO) and Michael Hakimi (CTO) worked together for over a decade, including at Akamai’s Tel Aviv office, before founding IO River in late 2022 and participating in the Intel Ignite accelerator program.
Image Credits: River IO
“Today, many Internet service companies are locked into a single vendor, or CDN,” Tsinovoi said. “This dependence has a significant impact on their resilience, performance and efficiency. Leading enterprise companies don’t really want to rely on a single edge vendor. Some have already made the transition to a multi-CDN, multi-edge platform architecture — but adopting and maintaining the architecture, with multiple edge vendors, is complex and expensive. Our goal at IO River is to make this possible for everyone.”
IO River offers the core services you’d expect from a multi-CDN platform: splitting traffic between providers to optimize for uptime, performance and cost, and a unified management console. This is all relatively simple, and for the basic functionality that all CDNs have in common (think URL redirection, for example), IO River can leverage its native APIs.
Running computing applications and services at the edge is where it gets complicated. After all, CDNs aren’t exactly meant to work together, so there isn’t much in common. What IO River does is provide its own application services such as web application firewall, rate limiting and origin load balancing. What is perhaps more important, however, is that it also offers a single edge computing platform that allows users to run the same code on all these different platforms without modification.
To get started, users can import their existing CDN provider settings and then add new providers on the fly. Since IO River continuously monitors the performance of various networks, it also provides a deep set of analytics, which in turn allow users to see which network they should use in a given location — or set automatic rules to switch between networks when problems arise.
The service’s enterprise platform currently supports Akamai, Cachefly, Cloudflare, Cloudfront, Edgio, EdgeNext, CDNetworks, Fastly, and GCore. There is also a free version, which is limited to 1 billion hits per month and does not support advanced features such as global rate limiting, unified origin load balancing, and IO River’s unified edge computing service.
“Internet-based companies live and die by the delivery of their content,” said Haim Sadger, co-founder of S Capital. “They start losing sales if their websites are down for just a few minutes or if their content is slow and unreliable. But equally, with increased financial pressures, data costs are a huge percentage of companies’ expenses. The classic approach of using a CDN does not solve all these problems. IO River offers a modern solution that meets market needs and we are excited to invest in Edward and Michael’s deep expertise and understanding of how to deliver Internet content to the world.”
