Fly.io secures $40M to bolster distributed edge cloud delivery
The application delivery network company, Fly.io recently raised $12 million in Series A funding and $25 million in Series B funding. The funds will go towards developing a distributed cloud technology and for hiring additional engineers and developers.
Fly.io was founded by Kurt Mackey to provide applications more efficiently by placing them closer to the user. The executive believes that the traditional method of doing this with a content delivery network (CDN) is inefficient, and he started Fly.io to deliver apps close to the end user in what he considers to be a more logical manner.
“Applications should run close to end users — full stop — but due to outdated clouds causing complications and high costs, we rarely see that as the case,” said Kurt Mackey, CEO and co-founder of Fly.io. “Fly.io’s public cloud solves that pain point and with this funding, we’ll be able to continue toward our goal of being the standard for the new cloud stack and improving the developer experience.”
Intel Capital led the Series A funding round and Intel Capital’s senior managing director, Nick Washburn also joined Fly.io’s Board of Directors at this time. Meanwhile, Andreessen Horowitz led the Series B funding. Other participants included Dell Technologies Capital, Initialized Capital, and Planetscale CEO Sam Lambert.
“Building a solution like Fly requires an incredibly special team — one that not only knows how to build an elegant developer experience but also knows how to build a global platform from networking to servers to software,” said Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “We’re very excited to be a partner as Fly changes cloud-native apps by providing the industry’s leading-edge compute platform.”
What makes Fly.io different?
Intel’s Washburn along with Intel Capital associate Alexandra Farmer described their interest in Fly.io in a recent blog post. While acknowledging that CDNs have done a good job with the front-end of web applications, including caching static content. More recently, innovation from companies such as Netlify and Vercel around JAMStack (JavaScript, have similarly greatly simplified front-end delivery, helping drive the speedy presentation of content.
“The back-end/full-stack engineering community had yet to really see a similar platform because the intelligent routing of application logic — including dynamic content and online transactions — to end-users at these thresholds is extremely complex for most developers. Not to mention terribly costly if done improperly,” the pair wrote.
Analysis
Cloudflare, Fastly, and, to a lesser extent, Akamai (among others) would disagree that dynamic content hasn’t been addressed by services they’ve developed over the course of the last half-decade or more.
It can, however, be said that doing so still isn’t as easy as developers might like, and using edge services from these companies requires investing in learning how to use the systems of that vendor. And by Intel’s account, Fly.io has excelled in engaging with the developer community and bringing them tools they like to use. Having companies like Dell and Intel introduce Fly.io to an even bigger audience of developers will be key to making some headway in the edge computing market.
Article Topics
Akamai | Andreesen Horowitz | application delivery | CDN | Cloudflare | Dell Technologies | DevOps | Fastly | Fly.io | Intel Capital | Jamstack | venture capital
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