Very big congrats to Artur, Ellen, Simon, Hooman and the Fastly team for raising a monster $40M VC round, bringing its total to $54M. The $40M raised is much higher than many anticipated in the CDN industry, including myself. That cash is going to do wonders in helping Fastly expand its infrastructure, sales teams, engineering teams, feature set, and POP count. According to the Network Map, Fastly currently has 18 POPs, with 8 more on the roadmap, that will bring its total POP count to 26. That’s a solid POP count that’s in line with Limelight and Level 3.
Does this round impact the overall CDN Ecosystem? Absolutely. Of all the start-up CDNs in the ecosystem, Fastly is in the best position to take over the spot left open by Limelight, right behind Akamai and EdgeCast, since Limelight made the smart choice to focus on the media and broadcast sector. Akamai and EdgeCast are two CDNs that offer the entire CDN feature set. Fastly should aim high to become the next large scale CDN. But in order to do that, Fastly must overcome the gargantuan challenge, and build out its innovation driven feature set in the areas of media services, security, and the wireless last mile. Fastly, there’s room in the middle for one more, so go for it.
