Instart Logic Inc., a richly funded startup that’s trying to disrupt the content delivery industry, has appointed a former top VMware Inc. executive as its chief executive.

Sumit Dhawan took the reins today, promising to accelerate the company’s growth and awareness of its mission to “change the experience of how we live digitally.”

Dhawan was previously general manager of VMware’s $1.5 billion end-user computing business and a group vice president and senior marketing executive at Citrix Systems Inc., which went public during his tenure. He succeeds co-founder Manav Mital, who will stay on as chief strategy officer.

“After the success of the business I was leading at VMware, I wanted to find a company to lead,” Dhawan said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. “I love the value proposition and the team here.”

Instart is seeking to carve out a niche in the large but little understood content delivery network market, where $2.5 billion Akamai Technologies Inc. is the leader. A CDN uses a network of globally distributed servers to deliver web pages and other online content to nearby users in order to optimize speed. CDNs also provide security services and gather usage metrics that are crucial to publishers and media companies that monetize content through user interaction.

Instart said its edge is its use of machine learning technology, as well as several other performance-boosting tricks, to speed up content delivery. It also has proprietary technology to limit the impact of bots as well as to subvert some ad blockers. It offers all this at a substantial discount to Akamai’s pricing.

The company has raised $140 million in financing, including a $30 million round last November, but needs a visibility boost. Co-founder Mital, whose background is primarily technical, actively participated in recruiting a CEO with experience growing a business. “He and the board made the decision that the company will scale much better with someone who has been through that scaling process before,” Dhawan said.

The new CEO said he has no immediate plans for major organizational change and that the company’s cash position and strategy are sound. “Everything the company is doing at this point in time is great,” he said. “I’ve been very supportive of all of the operating plans.”

Asked if Instart’s pricing, which was originally set at nearly 90 percent below Akamai’s, was up for review, he said, “It’s too early to tell.”

Dhawam praised the technology Instart has brought to the market as being in the right place at the right time. Most CDNs were conceived in the years of desktop personal computer dominance and aren’t architecturally equipped to handle the high expectations – and short attention spans – and mobile users for whom “a split-second delay can cause them to switch away,” he said. “Instart has the only platform that can make the experience awesome for today’s mobile and attention-shifting world.”

Photo: SiliconANGLE