Yottaa, based in Boston, was founded in April 2009 and has raised $29M in VC funding. They have about 60 employees and counting. I’ve been following them since their inception. Their entry into the CDN market was brilliant. Before they launched their CDN platform, they offered a free web performance test similar to webpagetest.org. All you had to do was enter the URL, and a detailed report would be generated.
Over the next several months, Yottaa had 75,000+ prospects for their CDN services. It’s worth noting that Yottaa was the first CDN to roll out FEO services, that were tightly integrated into their CDN platform. On top of that, they offered FEO services at a lower cost, much lower than existing FEO offerings at that time. The next major feature rollout was their WAF product, that instantly improved their security offering. Then, over time they transitioned from a traditional CDN, to a new type of CDN, and grabbed a ton of SMB customers in the process.
Yottaa Value Proposition
Yottaa changed its value proposition to User Engagement. Their target market are CMO’s, and they offer metrics that appeal to the CMO. Theses metrics are presented in dashboards and reports, that display page load times, bounce rates, abandonments rates, conversion rates, time to display, time to render, and much more.
Coach Wei, the CEO of Yottaa, reached out to me at the perfect time, and demoed the Yottaa “Story” and “Value Proposition”. It was impressive, and it seems they have nailed down a specific market, that has big potential. They have separated themselves from other CDNs like Fastly and CloudFlare. They are focusing on the transactional web site, especially ecommerce, where performance, reporting, feature sets, and value, trump over price. If your an ecommerce company generating millions of dollars of revenue yearly, the last thing you want to do is go with the low cost CDN provider.
Major Takeaway
The major takeaway from the demo, is the Yottaa platform now caters to mobile users. Not only does Yottaa enhance mobile application acceleration, by rendering the most important elements first, they provide metrics that track mobile usage. Coach talked about the application sequencer during the demo, which their website also mentions, and it immediately reminded me of another player by the name of Instart Logic. Instart Logic mentions the appsequencer.
Conclusion
I have to give it to Yottaa, they definitely understand the CDN game, and have adapted quickly, to the changing market dynamics. They are at the forefront of the innovation curve, along EdgeCast and Akamai. If Yottaa executes according to plan, in the next 4-7 years , they are going to be worth $500M.