IO River, a startup positioning itself as an “unbundler” of the legacy content delivery network (CDN) market, has raised a $20 million Series A round to expand its Multi-Edge platform, which aims to let enterprises operate across multiple edge providers through a neutral control layer.
The financing was led by Venture Guides and New Era, with participation from S Capital and additional private investors, including Ofir Ehrlich and Pavel Gurvich. IO River said it will use the proceeds to acceleratethe adoption of multi-edge architectures and further its broader goal of separating edge infrastructure from bundled add-on services such as security and compute.
IO River argues that for roughly two decades, major CDN providers have largely delivered performance, security and compute capabilities as integrated, closed ecosystems. The company’s approach is to create a virtualization layer that decouples those services from any single underlying provider, enabling customers to use multiple delivery networks without the engineering burden historically required to stitch them together.
The company said its platform centralizes configuration management, AI-based traffic steering and observability across providers to support uninterrupted, ultra-low-latency delivery. IO River also disclosed it is handling more than 200 petabytes of traffic per month, which it cited as evidence that “simple, intelligent” multi-edge operations can work at scale.
Beyond enterprise resilience and performance, IO River is also pitching its model as a way to broaden the edge ecosystem by enabling local, regional and telecom-based providers to participate in global content delivery, while allowing security and application vendors to deploy functions consistently across different delivery infrastructures.
The company pointed to heightened industry focus on resiliency following major outages affecting large cloud and edge platforms, and said shifting workloads — including AI-driven experiences — toward the edge is increasing demand for architectures that avoid single-provider dependency. IO River said its customer base spans global brands in streaming, gaming, retail and SaaS, and that its founders are edge-infrastructure veterans.
KEY QUOTES:
“Online services have always craved the benefits of multiple Edge networks without the operational pain. IO River makes that possible. We’ve built a Multi-Edge platform that brings the architectural power once reserved for the enterprises of the world to everyone else.”
Edward Tsinovoi, Co-Founder And CEO, IO River
“Multi-edge delivery was always the right architecture, but far too complex for most companies to implement. IO River removes that barrier, which is why adoption is accelerating so quickly across the market.”
Sage Nye, Partner, Venture Guides
“The next wave of internet infrastructure will be decentralized, intelligent and open. IO River is the first company turning that vision into a working reality.”
Gideon Argov, General Partner, New Era Capital Partners
“Teams have wanted the reliability and flexibility of multi-edge delivery for years, but the engineering complexity held many back. Our focus has always been to make this architecture simple, consistent and dependable at any scale.”
Michael Hakimi, Co-Founder And CTO, IO River
