Speedera added a layer of security to Web sites, resulting in reduction of risk of distributed denial-of-service attacks and bandwidth hijacking.
A provider of distributed application hosting and content delivery services, Speedera was founded by Ajit Gupta (CEO),[1] Rich Day (chief architect), and Eric Swildens (CTO).
Despite the end of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and a large number of competitors (30-plus at that time), Speedera had patented technology, a significant cost advantage and a customer focused sales philosophy that enabled the company to survive the economic downturn and grow rapidly enough to eventually achieve a profitable annual revenue run rate of $60 million.
In 2003 and 2004, both Deloitte & Touche and PricewaterhouseCoopers recognized Speedera as one of the top 10 fastest growing private companies in Silicon Valley and in North America.
It operated servers on more than 1,000 backbone networks in the Americas, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, putting the content physically closer to users, and speeding up downloads and streaming.
They included Fox Broadcasting Corporation, Amazon.com, Apple, Sony Music Entertainment, Nokia, Comcast, NASA, the European Space Agency, Walmart, Bank of America, Lowe's, The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, The Weather Channel, Nissan, NPR, iFilm, Atom Shockwave, Univision, Sirius Satellite Radio, the National Hockey League, the U.S. National Guard, Hoovers, Tag Heuer, Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, Verizon, Yahoo, Intuit, Intel, AMD, Macromedia, McAfee, Network Associates, Symantec, RSA Security, Inc., Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Softbank, Sify, Rediff and The Times of India.
[11] Speedera Networks was a privately held company funded by leading Silicon Valley companies, venture capitalists, a world-class university and others including: In 2003, CEO Ajit Gupta established a "Giving Back" philanthropy program for Speedera that provided free Internet infrastructure services to not-for-profit organizations, including Unicef.org, Goodwill Industries International, Autism.org, and the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
In response to the deadly Christmas tsunami of 2004 in the Indian Ocean, Speedera assisted UNICEF and other relief and recovery organizations by allocating a percentage of its infrastructure at no cost to ensure the expansion and availability of their websites to accept contributions and help victims and other families communicate with each other.