Edge-computing startup Vapor IO announced it has completed a $90 million Series C round of funding, as well as a new agreement with Cloudflare. Austin-based Vapor IO has now raised a total of $100 million in funding, which it will use to build-out its nationwide Kinetic Edge platform. Crown Castle and Berkshire Partners provided the investments into Vapor IO after the Series C funding round started in 2018.
Vapor IO's Kinetic Edge software-defined edge platform is an integrated system of edge colocation, networking and exchange services that operate at city-scale in key metropolitan regions. Kinetic Edge includes custom data centers, dedicated fiber and networking services to help content delivery networks, cloud providers and carriers deliver their services and applications to the network edge at low latency.
“The third act of the internet requires that we build out edge computing infrastructure as quickly as possible,” said Cole Crawford, founder and CEO of Vapor IO, in a statement. “By deploying Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge exchange, colocation and networking services in the top U.S. markets, we provide a platform to deliver low-latency edge capabilities at the intersection of the wireline and wireless networks. With a total of 36 multi-site markets coming online over the next 24 months, we expect to be the largest provider of edge colocation, edge networking and edge exchange services in close proximity to the last mile networks.”
The third act of the internet also includes cloud on-ramps that take data back to various public cloud companies, private cloud environments and owner-operated data centers where the enterprise itself might have a low latency or edge requirement, according to Crawford.
Vapor IO announced the launch of its Kinetic Edge Exchange (KEX) software-defined interconnection platform in October, and said then that that Digital Realty would launch Kinetic Edge in its Chicago and Atlanta data centers.
With KEX, the exchange services that are needed to support the emerging use cases occur at the edge of the last mile network with latency as low as 30 milliseconds and at a fraction of the backhaul cost of traditional, non-edge based approaches to traffic exchange.
RELATED: Vapor IO debuts Kinetic Edge Exchange, teams up with Digital Realty for network peering at the edge
In addition to Chicago and Atlanta, Vapor IO has also deployed its edge platform in Pittsburgh and Dallas, and has another 16 markets in "pre-construction." Those 16 markets are slated to be built-out this year. Vapor IO plans to take its Kinetic Edge to the top 36 metropolitan markets by the end of next year.
The first 20 cities slated for the Kinetic Edge platform are: Austin, Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington D.C.
Similar to last year's announcement with Digital Realty, Vapor IO also announced a partnership with Cloudflare on Wednesday. Cloudflare will roll out its cloud services on the Kinetic Edge platform across the 36 cities.
“Vapor IO has an aggressive rollout plan that spans the entire U.S.,” said Cloudflare's Nitin Rao, head of global infrastructure, in a statement. “Our mission is to help build a better internet and our customers demand from us the most performant platform with a consistent experience across geographies. By partnering with Vapor IO, we’re able to deliver the benefits of our edge computing platform, Cloudflare Workers, to a wide array of new locations.”