Last July, we wrote about how the founding team at Instart Logic pivoted from writing a cool technology platform for video games to building a disruptive software-based web application deliveryservice. This service, they hoped, would displace legacy hardware-centric CDNs such as Akamai and Verizon's EdgeCast and change how content, images and websites are delivered over the Internet.
Flash forward 18 months later: Instart Logic has grabbed significant market share, bagged big funding rounds and rolled out wave after wave of product and feature innovations. The company's new industry mantra "software-defined application delivery" is becoming a buzzword among network infrastructure analysts. Gartner Group named Instart Logic as one of its "Cool New Vendors" of 2014, a prestigious honor afforded to only a scant few startups. Forrester research stated,"Akamai, Limelight and Amazon CloudFront have done good work for the Web.But new approaches from Instart Logic ...point to the delivery-tier future."With dozens of happy clients, including marquee names like The Washington Post, ecommerce juggernaut One King's Lane and tech darling IFTTT (If This Then That), Instart Logic has lived up to its early promise and then some.
In its first six quarters, Instart Logic posted sequential sales growth numbers of 40 percent quarter over quarter. In other words, the company is growing at a clip of over 350 percent year over year. This is why the most famous venture capital investors in the world are clamoring to buy in. Instart Logic's CEO Manav Mital raised a $26 million C-round in May 2014 that included not only all of the investors in the first two rounds (Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, Tenaya Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures) but was led by the big kahuna of Silicon Valley venture capital Kleiner PerkinsCaufield Byers (KPCB).
On why KPCB decided to dive into Instart Logic, says general partner Matt Murphy, "Application performance and user experience have never been a more strategic, competitive differentiator. Instart Logic's software-defined application delivery approach is fundamentally different, delivering dramatic results for their customers and making existing content delivery networks obsolete."
During the first year of general availability of its services, Instart Logic has unveiled a host of breakthrough and market-leading capabilities. First came dynamic HTML and image streaming, which allowed companies to effectively stream data to websites in the background. This reduced the amount of time it took for a user to be able to first interact with sites by 30 to 50 percent. The performance improvement was even greater for mobile users, due to the fact that legacy CDNs cannot deliver improvements in last-mile performance and that the last mile is where most of the data bottlenecks are today.
After the initial release of dynamic image and HTML streaming, Instart Logic introduced dynamic image resizing. This is an automated service that allowed companies to seamlessly convert to Responsive Web Design (RWD) sites with scalable image sizes that fit any device or display screen. RWD sites are rapidly replacing older technologies because they allow website publishers to easily service multiple types of user devices with far less overhead and complexity. Instart Logic followed on this with InstantLoad, an innovative way to optimize browser caches on devices to ensure the most important content goes into the faster caches.
Then came another breakthrough, SmartVision. This is based on computer-vision technology,which can reduce the amount of data a website must load to provide a rich user experience by 30 to 70 percent, with no perceived reduction in image quality. Instart Logic also announced new cloud-based security capabilities, including its innovative ProxyWall service.
How confident is Instart Logic that they can beat Akamai head-to-head? In the fall of 2014 Mital and his team rolled out a $100 million contract buyout program to reimburse Akamai customers who break contracts to jump to Instart Logic. "We have no doubt that those customers which leave Akamai will stay with us for many years," says Mital. "Our roadmap is deep and we are pulling away from Akamai and other CDNs in every key technology area. We are the future and they are the past."