Instart Logic Inc., a startup that’s challenging content delivery network giant Akamai Technologies Inc., has an additional $30 million in the bank with which to make its case.

The investment was led by ST Telemedia, an arm of Singapore’s Temasek national wealth fund. It joins the already formidable lineup of investors that back Instart, which includes Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and the Stanford-StartupX Fund. They’ve collectively put $140 million into the startup’s coffers so far.

Instart Logic is attacking a market that’s considered difficult to penetrate because of the scope and size required to compete. A content delivery network uses a system of distributed servers to speed web pages and other online content to users based upon their geographic location. CDNs are crucial to publishers and media companies that must maintain speedy performance to minimize viewer attrition.

Instart Logic says it targets the “sweet spot” of sub-3.5-second web page performance that delivers maximum customer experience and revenue conversion. It claims that its ecommerce customers typically see a 5 to 8 percent increase in revenue after adopting its platform. It also undercuts Akamai’s prices by more than 90 percent.

What has enabled Instart to attract so much investor interest is its artificial intelligence-powered spin on the traditional content delivery network formula. Like other CDN operators, the startup copies clients’ web content across multiple data centers worldwide and serves up data to each user from the facility closest to them. But its platform takes the concept a step further with tools that use machine learning to speed up load times even more.

One of the main highlights is a capability called HTML Streaming. It decouples static content, the parts of a website that can be cached in Instart’s data centers, from dynamic elements such as personalized product offers generated on the fly. The startup delivers the static content right away and loads the dynamic parts from the website operator’s servers when they’re ready. This removes the need for users to wait until everything is fully prepared before they can interact with a page, which streamlines the overall experience.

In the same spirit, Instart has built a feature called JavaScript Streaming that prioritizes the client-side code powering a site’s interactive functions. Yet another homegrown technology fine-tunes the compression level applied to the images in a page based on each picture’s unique characteristics. 

One unique – and controversial – feature that Instart brings to the table is a technology that subverts ad blockers, the browser extensions that strip web pages of display and video advertising. EMarketer estimates that more than a quarter of online U.S. adults use ad blockers, and Instart said the technology has caused up to a 15 percent decline in online revenue for major publishers. Its technology uses encryption to scramble the advertising message so the ad blocker can’t detect it. Instart Logic said it recovers more than 5 billion digital ads each month that would otherwise be blocked.

Instart pairs its core feature set with capabilities designed to ease other key aspects of website management. The lineup includes an application firewall and controls for mitigating bot traffic. Besides its own CDN, several of Instart’s tools also work with external platforms. 

Other CDN providers are moving beyond traditional content delivery, too, in an effort to create new revenue streams. Cloudflare Inc., for instance, recently introduced a video delivery service that is positioned as a more convenient alternative to building a custom media streaming pipeline.

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