IO River exits stealth with $5.4M, launches first virtual edge platform to optimize Internet content delivery

IO River effectively turns multiple CDNs into one consistent network, ensuring all users get the best, most cost-effective content experience.

TEL AVIV, Israel, March 13, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- IO River (https://www.ioriver.io) exited stealth today and announced $5.4M in funding for the first multi-CDN-as-a-Service platform on the edge. The seed round was led by S Capital with the participation of other investors, including Aryeh Mergi (co-founder of XtremIO, M-Systems and Jeeng) and Ronni Zehavi (co-founder of HiBob and Cotendo). IO River enables online services companies to operate effectively across multiple edge platforms, achieving top performance, reliability, and cost efficiency with no additional layer or latency. The platform already serves more than 100 petabytes of traffic a month.

Today, Internet companies use a content delivery network (CDN) to ensure that users around the world can access content quickly and cheaply. The CDN market is dominated by a few big players, which have variable pricing, capabilities and performance depending on the region. A single network is also a single point of failure in case of an outage, leading some companies to explore using multiple edge networks instead of just one CDN vendor. However, this is very difficult with existing tools, forcing organizations to manage each service separately.

"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."

IO River is the first complete, holistic platform for managing multiple edge platforms, ensuring that users get the fastest, most cost-effective content served automatically by the optimal edge locations. IO River ensures Five Nines (99.999%) availability, improves performance by up to 50% and reduces delivery costs by up to 40%. 

IO River provides a unified user interface and API for configuring and controlling multiple edge networks, making them feel like a single super-network. Organizations can easily bring their existing providers into IO River, and add additional vendors without going through complicated migration and configuration processes. Companies can choose which edge network to use for different users, defining rules that optimize performance and cost based on the user location, type of traffic and other factors. Uniquely, IO River also offers consistent application services in a unified layer across multiple edge vendors, including web application firewall (WAF), rate limiting, traffic control and edge computing.

IO River was founded by Edward Tsinovoi and Michael Hakimi, two veterans of leading CDN company Akamai. The company, based in Tel Aviv, is an alumnus of the Intel Ignite deep tech accelerator program.

"Internet-based companies live and die by their content delivery," said Haim Sadger, co-founding partner of S Capital. "They start losing sales if their sites 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 massive proportion of companies' outgoings. The classical approach of using a CDN doesn't solve all these problems. IO River is offering a modern solution that meets the needs of the market, and we're excited to invest in Edward and Michael's deep expertise and understanding of how to deliver internet content to the world."

Edward Tsinovoi, co-founder and CEO of IO River, said "Every edge provider has its unique benefits. 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."

SOURCE IO River