Fastly, Inc.

When Artur Bergman founded Fastly in March 2011, he wasn't just building another content delivery network. Coming from his role as CTO at Wikia (where he managed traffic for millions of wiki pages), Bergman understood that the internet needed something fundamentally different — a platform that could handle real-time configuration changes and instant cache purging at global scale.

Fastly's breakthrough was making dynamic content behave like static content through their edge cloud platform. While traditional CDNs required waiting minutes or hours for cache updates to propagate globally, Fastly introduced instant purging with their Surrogate Keys system. When an e-commerce site updates a product price, Fastly can purge that specific content across their entire global network in under 150 milliseconds.

The company built their platform around Varnish Configuration Language (VCL), giving developers programmatic control over how their content gets cached and delivered. This wasn't just about speed — it was about making the edge programmable. Developers could write custom logic for routing, security, and content transformation that would execute at edge locations worldwide.

Today, Fastly operates as a publicly traded company (NYSE: FSLY) serving everyone from media giants to e-commerce platforms that need to handle massive traffic spikes during events like Black Friday. Their edge cloud platform now spans content delivery, security, compute, and observability — all designed around the principle that modern applications need real-time control over their global infrastructure.

What sets Fastly apart in the crowded CDN market is their developer-first approach combined with enterprise-grade security and observability tools. They're not just moving content closer to users; they're enabling companies to run complex applications at the edge with the same level of control they'd expect from their own data centers.