Virtual edge solution startup IO River Ltd. announced today it has raised $20 million in new funding to fuel its plan to decouple infrastructure from add-on services and help new players enter the market, permanently changing how edge services are built and bought.

Founded in 2022, IO River is focused on re-architecting how edge and content delivery services are built, operated and consumed. The company was created to challenge the long-standing, tightly bundled content delivery network model by separating underlying delivery infrastructure from higher-level services such as security, compute and application logic.

IO River’s offering includes a multi-edge platform that introduces a neutral virtualization layer across multiple edge and CDN providers. The layer is designed to allow enterprises to treat disparate delivery networks as a single logical system and, in doing so, remove the need to lock into one global vendor while still maintaining consistent performance, security and visibility.

The company’s technology offers advanced capabilities such as artificial intelligence-driven traffic steering, centralized configuration management and unified observability across providers. The platform offers a single interface that makes multi-edge architectures accessible to organizations that lack the scale or resources to build them independently.

IO River also opens the ecosystem to new participants by decoupling infrastructure from edge services. The ecosystem allows regional CDNs, telecom operators and specialized security or application providers to plug into the platform to offer enterprises the ability to choose the best provider for each geography or function rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all global network.

The company’s platform unlocks the architecture that lets enterprises benefit from multiple delivery networks without the operational overhead that once made it unattainable.

“Online services have always craved the benefits of multiple edge networks without the operational pain,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Edward Tsinovoi. “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.”

IO River has seen strong growth and is currently managing more than 200 petabytes of traffic each month. The company’s services are being used by streaming and video publishers, as well as gaming, retail and software-as-a-service companies. Notable customers include Minute.ly Inc., Shuffll Ltd. and RGE Media Group LLC.

The Series A round was led by Venture Guides and New Era Capital LP. S Capital LP and private investors including Ofir Ehrlich, CEO of Eon.io Inc., and Pavel Gurvich, co-founder and CEO of Tenzai Inc., also participated.

“Multi-edge delivery was always the right architecture, but far too complex for most companies to implement,” said Sage Nye, a partner at Venture Guides. “IO River removes that barrier, which is why adoption is accelerating so quickly across the market.”

IO River had previously raised a single round of $5.4 million in March 2024.

Image: IO River