Webscale
What they do: Provide a multi-cloud application control platform.
Problem they solve: Consumers demand a frictionless user experience when shopping online. Slow, non-responsive websites unable to handle sudden marketing-driven surges in traffic will turn a consumer away in seconds, and they’ll take potential revenue with them. Most mid-market e-commerce businesses use static hosting solutions, which makes the preparation for these traffic surges expensive and restrictive.
Many also pay for reserve capacity in the cloud, capacity that goes unused for long periods of time. This problem is compounded by a lack of control because business owners don’t have adequate insight into the daily demands placed on their site and are unaware of the benefits of moving to the cloud.
Backed by $20M VC, hot #Big50-2017 #Startup Webscale helps e-commerce companies sense and proactively control application behavior. Click To TweetOf the e-commerce businesses that understand the value of moving to the cloud, many don’t know how to get there, either because they are not large enough to have a trusted IT team to guide them, or they simply don’t trust the technology enough to depend on it.
How they solve it: The Webscale platform allows customers to “sense and proactively control application behavior.” According to Webscale, their platform’s ability to do this “in real-time, at a granular level, separates it from CDNs, ADCs, WAFs, and related software or appliance-based solutions that sit in static hosting environments, have limited visibility, and are capable of making only reactive decisions.”
The intelligent data plane of the Webscale platform is distributed across multiple cloud providers globally, is enabled per application, and sits in close proximity to the customer application backend. This delivers a 360-degree view over all web sessions entering and exiting the application. The data plane senses application and session behavior and, combined with the decision engine of the Webscale control plane, makes real-time, automated decisions for performance, infrastructure scaling, and security.
Headquarters: Mountain View, CA
CEO: Sonal Puri, CEO. Sonal previously served as CMO for Aryaka Networks. Prior to that, she ran global business operations, channels, and business development for Speedera Networks, where she also helped coordinate Speedera’s exit when that startup was acquired by Akamai.
Year Founded: 2012
Funding: In October 2016, Webscale closed a $12 million Series A1 round of funding, bringing the company’s total financing raised to $20M. Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV) led the round, which also included new investment from Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), Grotech, and Silicon Valley Bank.
Competitors include: NGINX, AVI Networks, A10, dedicated or managed hosting providers, and the integrated offerings from various large cloud providers, such as Amazon ELB
Customers Include: PlayStation, ThinkGeek, Fresh Produce, Skinit, and Michael Todd Beauty, Murad (Unilever), Skate1, BrasnThings, Eckler’s Automotive, Samuels Jewelers, and Snake River Farms, among others.
Why they’re in the Big 50-2017: Webscale is a two-time winner! In 2016, Webscale won the Startup50 online voting competition for the cloud sector – in a landslide. In fact, Webscale earned the most votes of any startup in last year’s Big 50 online voting.
Since the Big50-2016 published, Webscale locked down its Series 1A funding and has rolled out new services, including Webscale Cloud WAF. This new service integrates application awareness into e-commerce platforms by building out protection for both data traffic at the browser level, and the complete backend application infrastructure, in a single as-a-Service solution.
Another factor working in its favor is the fact that Webscale announced several new customer wins in 2017, including Murad (Unilever), Skate1, BrasnThings, Eckler’s Automotive, Samuels Jewelers, and Snake River Farms.
Finally, Webscale announced that its customers had a record-setting Black Friday/Cyber-Monday weekend, with its customers “doubling sales and hitting record page views.”
