IO River used its presentation at the 68th
IT Press Tour to introduce a new approach to edge infrastructure management that challenges the traditional content delivery network (CDN) model. Founded in 2022 by CEO Edward Tsinovoi and CTO Michael Hakimi, both former Akamai engineering leaders responsible for edge computing initiatives, the company argues that the architecture underpinning today's Internet delivery infrastructure has failed to keep pace with the growing complexity of cloud-native applications and the explosive rise of generative AI. Rather than building yet another CDN, IO River has developed what it describes as a "Virtual Edge" platform that virtualizes multiple CDN and edge providers into a unified operational layer. Its goal is to provide enterprises with the resilience, flexibility, and performance optimization previously achievable only by the world's largest Internet companies.
The founders' background plays a central role in the company's strategy. During their time at Akamai, Tsinovoi and Hakimi helped develop large-scale edge computing technologies and gained firsthand experience operating one of the Internet's largest distributed infrastructures. According to the company, this experience highlighted an important structural weakness within the industry: despite decades of technological progress, most organizations continue to depend on a single global CDN provider to deliver applications, websites, APIs, and streaming content. While this model worked reasonably well during the early decades of the web, IO River argues that it has become increasingly fragile in an era characterized by massive AI workloads, globally distributed users, and constantly changing traffic patterns.
Since its formation, IO River has attracted financial backing from several prominent investors. The company is supported by S Capital, formerly the Israeli branch of Sequoia Capital, together with Venture Guides, New Era, and Pags Group. In early 2026, it completed a $20 million funding round that increased total investment to approximately $25 million. Beyond financial support, the company has assembled an advisory board consisting of experienced executives from the networking, storage, cloud, and cybersecurity industries. Advisors include Ronni Zehavi, founder of Cotendo and HiBob; Aryeh Mergi, previously associated with XtremIO and M-Systems; Ash Kulkarni, Chief Executive Officer of Elastic and former Akamai executive; Marty Kagan, founder of Cedexis and Hydrolix; Ofir Ehrlich, founder of CloudEndure and Eon; and Pavel Gurvich, formerly of Guardicore. Collectively, these advisors bring experience from companies that have significantly influenced cloud infrastructure and enterprise software.
The central thesis presented by IO River is that today's CDN market remains fundamentally organized around assumptions established during the 1990s. Most organizations select a single CDN provider and entrust that vendor with all edge delivery responsibilities. Although this simplifies procurement and operations, it also creates a single point of failure. The company argues that this model no longer reflects the operational realities of modern digital businesses, particularly those supporting AI-driven applications, globally distributed APIs, or mission-critical online services.
To support this argument, IO River highlighted the frequency of outages affecting major edge providers. According to the company, every major CDN experiences a significant global outage approximately every one to three years, while smaller regional incidents occur on a monthly basis. Even service level agreements promising 99.9 percent availability still permit roughly six to ten hours of downtime annually without financial penalties. IO River cited several high-profile examples from recent years, including multiple Cloudflare incidents lasting between four and twenty-five hours during 2025 and early 2026, AWS CloudFront disruptions lasting seven and fifteen hours, a six-hour Akamai outage in 2025, a seven-hour Google Cloud incident in 2024, and a Microsoft Front Door outage in 2023. Regardless of the precise duration of individual events, the company's broader point was that even the largest cloud infrastructure providers remain vulnerable to significant service interruptions.
From the customer's perspective, the consequences of these outages can be severe. IO River argued that a single twelve-hour outage affecting a major online business could generate customer losses exceeding ten billion dollars through lost transactions, reputational damage, operational disruption, and reduced productivity. In many cases, these financial impacts far exceed the total lifetime revenue earned by the infrastructure vendor itself. As a result, the traditional model of relying on contractual service level agreements offers limited practical protection when outages occur.
Rather than creating another competing CDN network, IO River positions itself as a virtualization layer above existing edge infrastructure. The company emphasizes that it is neither a conventional CDN, nor simply a global load balancer, nor a traditional multi-CDN switching platform. Instead, it describes its architecture as a "Virtual Edge" that separates application services from the underlying infrastructure providers. This abstraction enables organizations to treat multiple CDNs as interchangeable infrastructure resources while managing them through a single operational platform.
The architecture consists of three distinct layers. The first layer focuses on intelligent traffic steering. Rather than directing all requests toward a single CDN provider, IO River dynamically distributes traffic across more than fifteen premium global and regional edge providers, including Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly, AWS CloudFront, Google Cloud CDN, Azure CDN, and others. Traffic routing decisions are driven by artificial intelligence models that continuously evaluate provider reliability, network performance, latency, and operating costs. Instead of intercepting traffic inline, the platform performs routing through DNS and CNAME manipulation. This architectural choice provides an important resilience benefit: if IO River itself experiences a failure, DNS continues directing traffic according to the most recent routing configuration, allowing applications to remain operational rather than introducing another infrastructure dependency.
The second architectural layer provides unified management and operational abstraction. One of the longstanding challenges of multi-CDN deployments is that every provider exposes different configuration languages, APIs, scripting models, and management tools. For example, Fastly relies on its VCL language while Akamai uses EdgeWorkers and proprietary configuration mechanisms. Maintaining equivalent application behavior across multiple providers therefore requires substantial engineering effort. IO River addresses this complexity by presenting administrators with a single management interface that automatically translates configurations into provider-specific implementations. Organizations can therefore define caching policies, routing behavior, security settings, and operational rules once rather than maintaining separate implementations for every CDN platform.
The third layer virtualizes higher-level application services traditionally bundled within CDN offerings. Rather than relying exclusively on each CDN vendor's proprietary implementations, IO River enables customers to deploy application services independently of the underlying infrastructure provider. These services include web application firewalls, bot management, API protection, edge compute functions, and serverless execution environments. Importantly, IO River does not attempt to develop all these capabilities internally. Instead, it partners with specialized technology vendors, including Check Point, Google, and others, integrating their products into the Virtual Edge platform. The company argues that this partnership model contrasts with incumbent CDN vendors, which historically attempted to develop every capability in-house and consequently often deliver "good enough" implementations rather than best-of-breed functionality.
A major operational advantage claimed by IO River is its ability to detect infrastructure degradation before providers publicly acknowledge service problems. Because the platform continuously monitors performance across multiple CDN vendors simultaneously, it can identify abnormal latency, packet loss, or service degradation in real time. When problems emerge, traffic is automatically redirected toward healthier providers. According to the company, this often occurs before vendors such as Cloudflare or AWS CloudFront officially recognize or announce outages. Consequently, customer applications may continue operating normally while users relying on a single provider experience widespread disruption.
The company also addressed one of the historical barriers to multi-CDN adoption: pricing. Traditionally, distributing traffic across multiple providers reduced purchasing volumes with each vendor, weakening customers' negotiating leverage and increasing per-gigabyte costs. IO River argued that this disadvantage has largely disappeared. Through aggregated purchasing, optimized traffic allocation, and closer collaboration with infrastructure providers, organizations can now maintain favorable commercial terms while simultaneously benefiting from increased redundancy and performance optimization.
Although still a relatively young company, IO River presented encouraging signs of commercial traction. After approximately one year of active sales activity, the platform has acquired around fifty enterprise customers with no reported customer attrition. Initial adoption has been strongest within industries where uptime directly affects revenue, including over-the-top streaming services, online media publishers, gaming companies, and educational technology providers. Representative customers include Minute Media, Nexon, and Plarium. More recently, the platform has expanded into additional sectors including e-commerce, travel, hospitality, and software-as-a-service. One highlighted customer within the hospitality sector is Accor Hotels, illustrating the platform's appeal beyond traditional digital-native businesses.
The company's pricing model reflects its position as an orchestration platform rather than a pure infrastructure provider. Customers pay a tiered platform subscription based on deployment scale, with optional charges if traffic is purchased through IO River rather than directly from CDN providers. Additional usage-based pricing applies to application services such as web application firewall processing or request-based security features. This flexible model allows organizations either to retain existing infrastructure contracts or to consolidate procurement through IO River depending on their operational preferences.
IO River's go-to-market strategy varies geographically. Within the United States, the company primarily sells directly to enterprise customers. In Europe, however, it relies more heavily on systems integrators and regional partners. Examples include GNN in Germany and Equativ in France. Interestingly, the company reported increasing collaboration with CDN providers themselves. Vendors such as Fastly now occasionally introduce IO River into customer opportunities because the platform's visibility into multiple providers helps demonstrate each CDN's unique strengths rather than simply comparing pricing. This evolution suggests that some infrastructure vendors increasingly view multi-provider orchestration as complementary rather than purely competitive.
Operationally, IO River maintains an approximately even split between engineering and commercial functions. Research and development activities are concentrated in Tel Aviv, leveraging Israel's strong cybersecurity and networking engineering ecosystem, while sales, marketing, and customer-facing operations are primarily based in the United States. The company has also filed multiple U.S. patents covering aspects of its Virtual Edge architecture, reflecting efforts to protect its technological innovations as the platform matures.
Financially, the recently completed funding round provides an estimated two-year operating runway, allowing the company to continue expanding both product capabilities and market presence. Looking forward, IO River views generative AI as one of the primary drivers reshaping edge computing requirements. AI applications generate highly dynamic workloads, unpredictable traffic patterns, and increasingly distributed processing demands that challenge traditional single-provider architectures. By abstracting multiple infrastructure providers into a unified operating platform, IO River believes organizations will be better positioned to optimize performance, resilience, cost, and geographic distribution as AI workloads continue to grow.
Overall, IO River presented a vision in which edge infrastructure evolves similarly to cloud computing, where organizations routinely operate across multiple providers instead of depending on a single vendor. Rather than replacing existing CDN providers, the company seeks to orchestrate them, allowing customers to leverage each provider's strengths while minimizing the operational complexity traditionally associated with multi-CDN deployments. Through AI-driven traffic steering, unified configuration management, integrated application services, and resilient architecture that avoids introducing additional single points of failure, IO River aims to make enterprise-grade edge resilience accessible to organizations that previously lacked the resources to engineer sophisticated multi-provider infrastructures. In the company's view, the Virtual Edge becomes the "easy button" for the multi-cloud, multi-edge era, giving businesses of all sizes the operational flexibility, reliability, and vendor independence that until now has largely been reserved for Internet giants such as PayPal and other hyperscale online platforms.
