Backed by $140 million in funding from a blue-chip roster of investors, startup Instart Logic Inc. is taking on content-delivery giant Akamai Technologies Inc.

The upstart today introduced an integrated set of offerings that encompasses performance guarantees, advertising revenue shares and integrated defense against bots. The company is also touting a claim that’s bound to stir some controversy: It says its technology can do an end-run around ad blockers to deliver promotions even to viewers who have installed technology to screen them out.

Instart Logic said it’s applying modern machine learning to the mature market for content delivery networks, or CDNs, which distribute servers geographically to optimize the speed and quality of Web page delivery to users. The technology is considered critical to businesses such as publishing and e-commerce, where abandonment and customer dissatisfaction rates rise in proportion with load times. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has said that every additional second a webpage spends loading sends conversion rates down by 7 percent.

With $2.2 billion in 2015 revenue, Akamai is considered the big dog in the pack, but Instart Logic said it has a better deal. It’s combining an assortment of services that it previously sold a la carte into a package for web publishers that combines commodity pricing with performance guarantees and revenue-sharing.

Asserting that caching and network optimization are now commodity services, the company is charging just a fraction of its rivals’ fees – about $60,000 compared with Akamai’s $2 million – for those basic functions. But the company isn’t looking to undercut its competition as much as move the revenue sources elsewhere. For example, it’s charging $1.2 million for machine learning-based performance enhancements, but guaranteeing 20 percent faster speed as measured by an independent third party. “For e-commerce company, that’s a five percent upside in conversions,” said Shailesh Shukla, chief marketing officer and vice president of products. If Instart Logic doesn’t deliver, customers don’t pay.

The company attributed its confidence to a set of cloud-based technologies it calls an “interpretable machine learning system” and SmartVision, an image processing feature that currently handles 125 billion images and three billion HTML and Javascript queries per month. SmartVision analyzes images in real time and applies the most appropriate delivery optimization algorithms, the company said, getting better at optimization over time.

Founded in 2010, Instart Logic has traveled mostly under the radar, but has amassed an impressive stable of prominent clients, including The Washington Post Co., Office Depot Inc. and AutoNation Inc. “Most of our customers have discontinued Akamai entirely,” Shukla claimed. The company’s investors include Andreessen Horowitz LLC, Greylock Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. It claims more than 80 patents on its technology.

No bots allowed

The revamped package the company is rolling out today also includes security technology that combines application, network and what it calls “experience” protection, as well as bot detection and blocking. Experience protection is a virtualization layer that the company said protects users against malicious plugins and bots. By some estimates, bots account for more than 60 percent of overall web traffic, costing advertisers billions of dollars a year in ads that are never seen by a human. Instart Logic says its security technology can stop them in their tracks.

Finally, it’s bundling an ad control package called Ad Integrity that, among other things, subverts ad blockers, those browser plug-ins that strip web pages of display and video advertising. Ad blockers are a growing problem for advertising-supported media. Juniper Research estimates they’ll have cost digital publishers over $27 billion by 2020. Ad blockers are also a flash point for a growing number of consumers, who say intrusive advertising slows their web browsing experience, bothers others with auto-start videos and impedes their access to information.

On this issue, Instart Logic is squarely on the side of the advertiser. It uses a small piece of code called a “nanovisor” that injects itself into the browser and creates a point of control for what happens on the webpage. It then uses encryption to disguise the content of the ad from the blocking software.

“As traffic comes through, it’s encrypted, then sent to the browser,” Shukla said. “The ad blocker can’t understand what the content is, so it lets it through.” He said the nanovisor is dedicated to a single browser session and disappears once the page is closed, thereby skirting any need for user permission.

More importantly, it permits publishers to monetize their content in the only way that’s available to them, he said. “The webpage is owned by the publisher and [the publisher] has the right to show the page as it wants it to be displayed,” he said.

The technology is probably effective, because Instart Logic’s advertising customers are the only ones that won’t permit their names to be used for promotion. You would recognize most of them, though. Pricing wasn’t formally announced, but based upon the company’s press briefing, entry prices are in the low millions of dollars.

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