While investors funnel hundreds of billions into the AI startup ecosystem, driving hype to unprecedented heights, the CDN industry remains largely focused on its current operations—at least for now. However, the long-term outlook for the CDN sector presents significant challenges, a topic we’ll explore in greater depth in a future discussion.
Established players like Cloudflare, Akamai, and AWS CloudFront will maintain dominance, leveraging their economies of scale and leading with product innovation. The competitive landscape can be categorized as follows:
- Enterprise Leaders: Akamai, Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront
- Midmarket Players: Fastly,
StackPath, Edgio, Lumen CDN - Niche Providers: Medianova, Mainstreaming, Cachefly, CDN77, Bunny.net, and others
- Software Solutions: Qwilt, Broadpeak, Wowza, Varnish, Nginx (F5), HAProxy, and similar platforms
- Emerging Startups: Render, Fly.io, Netlify, Vercel, Macrometa, Momento (Redis-like), and others
StackPath, Edgio, and Lumen CDN are no more. Fastly, the last remaining midmarket player faces intense pressure to expand its product portfolio to ensure long-term survival. The other segments continue their uphill battle to achieve product-market fit and accelerate growth.
Consolidation in the industry has already benefited some players. StackPath, Lumen CDN, and Edgio exits have freed up hundreds of millions of dollars in delivery revenue, now shifting to competitors. On a separate note, Akamai plans to exit the CDN market in China—a notable strategic retreat.
Here are the latest funding rounds for the startups in the CDN Ecosystem. Not all are pure-play CDNs. We have hybrids that are leveraging the cloud provider networks but offer content delivery as an add-on, thus, it’s not their main business. The others are software providers that offer a niche service like caching.
| Company | Founded | # of Employees | Total Raised | Valuation |
| Vercel | 2015 | 596 | $563M | $3.25B |
| Netlify | 2015 | 203 | $212M | $2B |
| Render | 2018 | 124 | $77.5M | — |
| Fly.io | 2016 | 61 | $115M | — |
| Macrometa | 2017 | 83 | $68M | — |
| Momento | 2021 | 41 | $30M | — |
Among startups, Vercel stands out with $100M ARR, proving that their approach—treating content delivery as a secondary, add-on service—provides some immunity to industry pricing pressures. You could say they are the next Cloudflare. We could see them IPO next year if the market looks favorable.
CDN Product Evolution
The CDN industry has experienced three distinct waves of product innovation, each driving vendors to rethink their business models and find new avenues for revenue growth in a fiercely competitive landscape. Akamai and Cloudflare exemplify two successful yet contrasting approaches. Akamai leaned on strategic acquisitions, absorbing startups and competitors to expand its capabilities. In contrast, Cloudflare chose to focus on in-house development, building a robust suite of features internally to differentiate itself in the market
- Streaming: RTMP, DVR, encoding, ad insertions, VoD, live, HLS, etc.
- Security: DDoS Protection, Bot Mitigation, WAF, API Security, SASE, etc.
- Edge: Lambda, Workers, Functions-as-a-Service, object storage, distributed SQL, etc.
- AI Agent Era: What comes next?
Some CDNs have expanded their product portfolio drastically. Akamai acquired Linode, entering the web hosting segment and Cloudflare has built out its network portfolio.
- Content Delivery: Caching, log management, rules engine, analytics, origin protection, load balancing, image optimization, and more.
- Video: VoD delivery, live streaming, encoding, DVR, DRM, rate limiting, packaging, and more.
- Security: WAF, bot mitigation, DDoS protection, API security, and SASE.
- Edge Computing: Functions, object storage, key-value stores, workers, and more.
Core services like basic delivery, WAF, and computing continue to generate significant revenue today. However, as AI-driven technologies gain prominence, these traditional services may face challenges. Many were originally designed for legacy application architectures and may require substantial reengineering to meet the demands of AI’s fundamentally different requirements. This shift could redefine the relevance of these traditional offerings, raising questions about their adaptability in an AI-first world. We’ll delve deeper into this topic in a future post. Reflecting on these changes over time will offer valuable insights, especially as the industry landscape continues to evolve.
