MetaCDN today announced it had completed a US$2.3M investment round led by Starfish Ventures and the University of Melbourne Endowment fund.

MetaCDN's cloud-based content acceleration and delivery platform is disrupting the large and growing market for Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), previously dominated by established vendors such as Akamai, Level 3, Limelight and others.

Martin Ryan, CEO of MetaCDN, said, "Online businesses of any size can now instantly connect to and service a global customer base with confidence. MetaCDN provides them with 'local' performance, 100% guaranteed uptime and pay as you use pricing. We uniquely leverage the global cloud to offer enterprise class content acceleration capability to any e-commerce website, publisher or content service."

CDNs accelerate web platforms by ensuring content such as videos, images and web files are dynamically served from multiple network locations, reducing the distance travelled between web platform and user. In the past, CDNs have been a technology accessible only to large companies because they rely on dedicated network infrastructure.

With MetaCDN, even the smallest e-commerce retailers and content publishers can affordably accelerate their web and online performance. MetaCDN dynamically optimises and blends cloud services from Amazon, Edgecast, Microsoft, Google and others to create the world's largest and fastest cloud CDN. MetaCDN selects the best delivery location in real time for each user based on speed, availability and price.

Traditional CDN vendors lock customers into costly and inflexible fixed contracts. MetaCDN's Ryan says the company's 'ease of use' philosophy and 'pay-as-you use' pricing model promises instant deployment while easing the financial risk faced by online businesses of predicting and managing variation in traffic demand as they expand. "In recent years, we've seen how cloud services can help business grow and scale and we've applied these principles to the CDN sector through our unique technology."

"Ease of use and pay-as-you-use pricing lowers the hurdle for customers who can benefit from CDN services, and provides flexibility as their business grows. There is a large and rapidly growing market for online businesses that can benefit from CDN services but they've been ignored or penalised by locked-in contracts, excessive charges and variable performance. We are changing that," Ryan says.

"We are delighted to have the support of Starfish in this next phase of our growth and we'll be using this injection of capital to expand our sales, development and support teams in the United States and Europe, to service our increasingly global customer base."

Anthony Glenning, Investor Director at Starfish Ventures, said: "We see MetaCDN as a next generation CDN provider. This technology brings incredible value to an increasingly online world, and we expect MetaCDN to really shake up the market in the near future. Similar to the way SaaS and the cloud have revolutionised software applications, MetaCDN is helping businesses by bringing the advantages of instant scalability and no contracts to CDNs. Leveraging the cloud makes MetaCDN super nimble which means value added services, technology advancements and cost reductions can be delivered to customers in real time. That's a terrific business model."

About MetaCDN

MetaCDN is a pioneering 'next generation' content platform offering enterprise-class content acceleration, delivery, video encoding, streaming services and analytics on an unmatched global scale for the very smallest to the very largest business.

Our patent pending technology ensures user requests for content are met by dynamically optimising and blending cloud services from any provider to select the best delivery location for users based on speed, availability and price.

Our mission is to improve our customers business by making online experiences faster and more human for their customers.

Founded in 2011 from research out of the University of Melbourne, MetaCDN is backed by leading Australian venture capital firm Starfish Ventures and the University of Melbourne's commercialisation arm.

For more information, visit http://www.metacdn.com.