Akamai Reportedly Buying Rival Cotendo For Up To $350 Million

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Sunday, November 27th, 2011
cotendo

Classify this as a rumor for now, but Israeli business press is reporting that Akamai is poised to take over one of its competitors, website and mobile acceleration technology vendor Cotendo, for $300 million to $350 million. Founded in 2008, Cotendo has raised over $36 million in funding from investors like Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Tenaya Capital.

A few months ago, Cotendo raised $17 million in new funding from its previous backers, with Citrix Systems and Juniper Networks stepping in as strategic investors as well. Other strategic partners include Google, AT&T and Sumitomo Corporation.

The company specializes in acceleration services for dynamic Web apps, static and dynamic web content, performance monitoring and automatic failover as well as real-time reporting and analytics. Obviously, Akamai also provides such services to its clients, but is much bigger than Cotendo.

On an interesting sidenote: a year ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology joined Akamai in suing Cotendo over patent infringement.

Cotendo is headquartered in Silicon Valley with R&D facilities near Netanya, in Israel. Its three co-founders are Commtouch Software veterans.

According to Globes, Cotendo customers include Zynga, Vistaprint and Facebook. The company’s advisory board includes Jonathan Heiliger, currently VP of Technical Operations at Facebook.


Company: Cotendo
Website: cotendo.com
Launch Date: January 2008
Funding: $36M

Cotendo is a CDN and Site Acceleration Services provider and an innovator of software-focused CDN technologies. Cotendo is led by experts in intelligent content management and content delivery networks.

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Website: akamai.com
Launch Date: August 1, 1998
IPO: NASDAQ:AKAM

Akamai is a leading web services provider based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is the primary player in content delivery expediting space. It was started in 1998 to use advanced computing techniques to deliver a streamlined web experience to the end user. Its first customer was Yahoo. Since 1998 Akamai has retained content delivery as its core business, but has also branched out with two tiers of professional Internet consulting services along with related digital media and site delivery solutions....

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