A SoftLayer veteran bets on the edge
StackPath was incorporated on May 5, 2015, in Dallas, Texas, by Lance Crosby alongside a large founding team. Crosby had co-founded SoftLayer Technologies, the cloud-hosting company IBM acquired in 2013, and ran IBM's enterprise cloud business before leaving in 2015 to build what he described as a secure platform at the edge. Rather than grow organically, StackPath was conceived as a roll-up: it would buy proven infrastructure businesses, merge their technology, and present a single security-and-delivery platform. Its first product, SecureCDN, paired content delivery with a built-in web application firewall and DDoS protection.
Buying its way to scale
StackPath assembled itself through rapid acquisitions. In 2016 it bought CDN provider MaxCDN (formerly NetDNA), DDoS-mitigation firms Staminus and Fireblade, and the Cloak VPN service. In 2017 it acquired Highwinds Network Group, a CDN operator that gave it substantial network capacity, and in 2018 it bought infrastructure-monitoring company Server Density. The strategy assembled an impressive footprint quickly, but it also meant stitching together several distinct codebases, networks, and customer bases into one platform, a roll-up integration burden that would shadow the company.
The pivot to edge compute
Backed by investors including ABRY Partners, Juniper Networks, and Cox Communications, and having raised close to $400 million across two rounds (a 2017 round was reported at $216 million), StackPath repositioned from a CDN-and-security vendor into an edge-computing platform. From 2018 it offered virtual machines and containers running close to users across its points of presence, ultimately operating 73 edge locations across 43 metro markets. The pitch was lower latency by running workloads at the edge, but it placed StackPath in direct competition with far larger and better-capitalized rivals.