07-02-2018

Our Investment in Section.io

by Ryan McIntyre

We are pleased to announce that Foundry Group has made a Series A investment in Section.io. Based in Boulder, CO and Sydney, Australia, Section.io is building a modular, API-driven reverse-proxy layer to provide web engineers with greater flexibility, transparency, and control over advanced edge compute for delivery of their web applications.

Section.io was founded in Sydney, Australia by Daniel Bartholomew and Stewart McGrath, who became frustrated with the rigid “black box” approach of legacy Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), and the misalignment of those CDNs with modern DevOps principles. Stewart and Daniel recognized CDNs were not able to adapt to quickly enough to keep pace with modern software development practices.

Section.io believes there is no “one size fits all” approach when it comes to what software an engineer should choose for their application edge, or indeed on how many endpoints or where that application edge should exist. Section.io also believes that as more compute is taking place at the edge, software should be more reflective of an engineer’s application stack: fully-programmable, flexible, and easily adaptable.

Section.io’s container-based approach to HTTP traffic delivery includes highly available and highly performant HTTP traffic control modules which can be run in a distributed fashion as a CDN and/or behind the firewall as an Application Delivery Controller.

Modules currently available on Section.io include Varnish CacheTM, OpenResty, Image Optimization modules, Web Application Firewall modules, server-side multivariate testing, virtual waiting room, Google’s PageSpeed, and other front end optimization options. As a container-based platform, new modules are being added frequently. Providing a truly DevOps-centric platform, all modules have consistent configuration-as-code and diagnostics capabilities.

Section.io fits into our Glue and Protocol themes as their PaaS connects compute infrastructure from multiple service providers for improved HTTP traffic delivery from a true federation of compute providers.

We met Daniel and Stewart as they were applying to the 2016 Boulder Techstars class, and have followed their progress since they graduated from the program. We are excited to have an opportunity to work even more closely with them through our investment in the company.