StackPath's New Series B Lifts Its Total Equity Raised to $396M

Dallas-based edge computing innovator StackPath announced a Series B equity funding round that it will use to accelerate growth in product development, engineering, and go-to-market activities.

The amount of the round was not disclosed, but it was led by California-based Juniper Networks and Atlanta-based Cox Communications. Barclays Capital and PJ Solomon were lead placement agents; Barclays Capital Inc., PJ Solomon, and DH Capital acted as financial advisers; and DLA Piper acted as the legal advisor.

Including an earlier Series A round led by Abry Partners, the new funding brings StackPath’s total equity raised to $396 million.

“We’ve laid the technology and operational foundation for StackPath to be the default edge-computing platform. Juniper and Cox join us at the beginning of the next phase of our strategy—which is to deliver more on our foundation and move it even closer to end users and devices,” StackPath CTO Wen Temitim said in a statement.

Edge computing allows data produced by IoT devices to be processed closer to where it was created, instead of sending it over long distances to data centers or clouds.

“Edge computing brings an evolution of network security and performance to the cable industry. It will give our residential and business customers access to the next generation of connected services and experiences by bringing valuable processing power closer,” said Sujata Gosalia, executive vice president and chief strategy officer for Cox Communications.

Gosalia, along with Kevin Hutchins, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development for Juniper Networks, have joined StackPath’s board of directors.

“When Juniper [Networks] began working with StackPath on its infrastructure needs, we were blown away by how well their vision maps to our own,” Hutchins said. “Further, we found that StackPath is one of the only companies that has a scalable, high-performance edge cloud already running in the market with mission-critical customer workloads.”

Edge-cloud functionality is critical for businesses

StackPath delivers real edge compute products: virtual machines (VMs), containers and serverless, content delivery network (CDN), web application firewall (WAF), managed DNS, service monitoring, and DDoS protection.

Hutchins said that edge computing and edge-cloud functionality are as vital as enterprises, service providers, and cloud providers in this cloud era.

“In this new world, applications are increasingly dependent upon the network,” he said. “The transformation of the edge complements the cloud and on-premise solutions to ensure cost-effective performance, global scale, security and high quality of experience for mission critical applications including next-generation content delivery, interactive gaming, data management, analytics, IoT and 5G, among many others.”

Hutchins also thinks the edge will be, in the future, an important dimension of every service provider and enterprise operation.

Last year, we spoke with Co-founder Lance Crosby and Chief Product Officer Ben Gabler, who further explained how edge computing is going to change everything in the future.

“Edge computing is the next big evolution of computing. Our Secure Edge Platform allows users to deploy their latency critical workloads as close to their users and devices as possible. Users will be able to make decisions based on data consumption up to 2.6x faster than with cloud computing,” Gabler said at the time.

Crosby touted the startup’s performance capabilities.

“StackPath offers two separate types of services, 1) a secure edge platform, and 2) high performance security services built on that platform. First, our secure edge platform lives in 45 internet exchanges globally, allowing users to spin up containers, virtual machines, or serverless features in seconds,” he said. “Stuffed with SSL encryption cards, FPGAs, GPUs, and ultra-high-performance Smart Network Cards, we allow users to offload the heavy crypto workloads to the proper cards while allowing the compute to deliver the data payloads connected directly to the eyeball networks.”

Crosby is an edge and cloud computing pioneer. His previous venture, Softlayer, sold to IBM for $2 billion in 2013. He emerged StackPath from stealth in 2016.

Forecasts show increasing need to grow edge computing

StackPath said that Gartner Research forecasts that throughout this year, organizations will continue to accelerate digital business as the internet becomes executable. A secured, decentralized world of distributed networks and applications will usher in the opportunity age.

In the coming years, more than 3 billion new customers are expected to enter the commercial life cycle for the first time, according to Gartner.

StackPath predicts the rapid growth of the edge is partly attributable to burgeoning 5G digital cellular networks that will reduce wireless network latency up to 10 times and increase volume capacity by a predicted 40 percent percent per user over current 4G standards.