Fastly grabs $40M on its quest to build a big, cool content-delivery network

Fastly, a startup looking to challenge the biggest companies in the business of distributing content around the world for quick online access, has brought on $40 million in fresh money.

Announced today, the funding will assist Fastly in expanding its infrastructure internationally, with an emphasis on Japan, Australia, and Europe in general, founder and chief executive Artur Bergman said in an interview with VentureBeat. Rather than compete on price, Fastly likes to drum up business by being, well, fast.

“Customers are happy to pay for that,” Bergman said.

The content-delivery network (CDN) market has proven interesting for investments and acquisitions.

Verizon last year acquired EdgeCast. CDN and security provider CloudFlare announced a $50 million round late last year. Apple has started serving web requests through its own CDN, which could be useful when it’s time to download an operating-system update. Meanwhile, CDN giant Akamai has hung around.

Fastly aims to stand out by storing customers’ content on speedy solid-state drives and delivering it over 10-gigabit Ethernet. It even employs software-defined networks based on Arista switching hardware that can help Fastly “choose the best path out into the Internet,” Bergman said, and ultimately deliver content more quickly than it could without such techniques.

Above: The Fastly team.

Image Credit: Fastly

Before starting Fastly in 2011, Bergman was chief technology officer at community-site hosting company Wikia, where he disliked the CDN service the company was receiving from a major provider. So Bergman took to building his own. Now Wikia is a Fastly customer, along with Disqus, GitHub, Kickstarter, Pinterest, and Twitter.

And Fastly has provided CDN as an underlying layer of services from startups like Firebase and Imgix.

Bergman said Firebase’s use of Fastly, which entails storing static client-side content on Fastly’s widespread global infrastructure, is “a good example of the kind of customer that’s trying to push the envelope of what you can do with a CDN and move as much of what would normally be origin to the edge.”

Fastly introduced a streaming-media service last year.

August Capital led the new round in San Francisco-based Fastly, which employs around 115 people. IDG Ventures, Battery Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and Amplify Partners also participated.

To date the startup has raised more than $50 million, Bergman said.