CDN Limelight Takes in $130 Million Financing From Goldman, Others; Eyes Akamai

Possibly the biggest venture financing in digital media in a long long time, but this is an infrastructure play…all in an attempt to dislodge the king of CDNs, Akamai. Limelight Networks, the Tempe, AZ-based broadband content delivery network, has raised an astounding $130 million in funding, led by Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, and joined by others. Recently Akamai sued Limelight for patent infringement.
This money is the first major outside institutional money into the five year old firm…last year it took $15 million in venture debt funding in a round led by Silicon Valley Bank.
Since it started, Limelight has bet that increasingly powerful broadband networks will in turn fuel demand for faster Internet programming distribution networks, its specialty. Some of its customers include MySpace, Facebook, FoxNews.com, IFilm, MSNBC.com, Xbox Live and others.
SiliconBeat explains the Akamai vs Limelight numbers: Akamai doesn’t break down its revenue by industry, but it looks like Limelight may soon surpass Akamai in serving “media” related traffic. Limelight booked about $10.5 million in revenue Q1, and booked about $14.5 million in revenue in Q2 — which is 40 percent growth sequentially. Meanwhile, Akamai, which is running around $85 million across its various businesses, says roughly a third to a quarter of that comes from “media” transmission — but that includes traffic from text-based sites like WaPo, among others. So Limelight may be the biggest kid on the block in transmitting videos and other social media, the post says. More on Limelight’s earnings numbers here.
Motley Fool also breaks down the competitive debate, here.
Earlier today, I mentioned funding of another startup CDN Panther Express’ $6 million funding.

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