IO River founders (pictured left to right): Michael Hakimi, CTO, and Edward Tsinovoi, CEO.
BOSTON, Jan. 14, 2026, the company unbundling the legacy CDN market through Edge-level innovation, today announced a $20 million Series A funding round led by Venture Guides and New Era, with participation of S Capital and private investors including Ofir Ehrlich and Pavel Gurvich. The round fuels IO River's plan to decouple infrastructure from add-on services and enable new players to enter the market, permanently changing how Edge services are built and bought.
Virtualizing the Edge
For two decades, the CDN industry has bundled delivery, security and compute into closed ecosystems controlled by a few global vendors (such as Akamai, Cloudflare and Fastly). IO River breaks that model. Its Multi-Edge platform decouples infrastructure from add-on services, allowing security companies a designated function to run consistently across providers.
IO River's platform unlocks the architecture that finally lets enterprises benefit from multiple delivery networks without the operational overhead that once made it unattainable.
"Online services have always craved the benefits of multiple Edge networks without the operational pain," said Edward Tsinovoi, co-founder and CEO of IO River. "IO River makes that possible. We've built a Multi-Edge platform that brings the architectural power once reserved for the enterprises of the world to everyone else."
Technology Simplicity Accelerates Multi-Edge Adoption
What once required full engineering teams and many resources can now be achieved through one interface. This simplicity is accelerating multi-edge adoption among enterprises that previously lacked the scale, finances or expertise to build it in-house.
IO River solves these challenges by introducing a neutral virtual layer to manage configuration, AI-based traffic steering and observability across providers, ensuring uninterrupted, ultra-low latency delivery. With more than 200 PB of traffic each month, IO River is already proving how effective simple, intelligent Multi-Edge can be at scale.
"Multi-edge delivery was always the right architecture, but far too complex for most companies to implement," said Sage Nye, Partner at Venture Guides. "IO River removes that barrier, which is why adoption is accelerating so quickly across the market."
Opening the Edge Ecosystem to New Providers
IO River's technology enables local, regional and telecom-based providers to participate in global content delivery. By separating delivery infrastructure from edge services, IO River allows security and application providers to enrich the Edge. This makes the Edge richer in advanced functionalities. This creates a more open and diverse market on both sides of the edge and allows companies to choose the providers that best fit each region and function.
"The next wave of internet infrastructure will be decentralized, intelligent and open," said Gideon Argov, General Partner at New Era Capital Partners. "IO River is the first company turning that vision into a working reality."
Why Now: Market Timing and Industry Shift
Recent outages at AWS, Cloudflare and Azure have exposed the risk of single-provider dependence. Enterprises like Sky, Amazon and PayPal invest in full teams to manage Multi-Edge architectures for resilience and cost control. IO River makes that capability accessible to everyone.
At the same time, users expect flawless performance. Viewers have zero tolerance for buffering or lag, and businesses are moving functions to the Edge to meet that demand.
AI is moving to the Edge and the industry platforms are already preparing for it, like how Cloudflare and Akamai have included AI services into their solutions. IO River unlocks access to these capabilities across any provider, giving online services a simple path to the next generation of AI-driven experiences.
"Teams have wanted the reliability and flexibility of multi-edge delivery for years, but the engineering complexity held many back," said Michael Hakimi, co-founder and CTO of IO River. "Our focus has always been to make this architecture simple, consistent and dependable at any scale."
About IO River
IO River's platform unifies traffic steering, security and observability across multiple edge providers, enabling enterprises to operate distributed delivery infrastructures as one system. Founded by edge-infrastructure veterans and backed by Venture Guides, New Era and S Capital, IO River serves global brands in streaming, gaming, retail and SaaS.
www.ioriver.io
Media Contact
Deb Montner and Chloe Amante
Montner Tech PR
dmontner@montner.com, camante@montner.com
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/733561f4-d51e-4f54-a3bc-2ba1678d66b8
