New Funding in Hand, VaporIO Plans Kinetic Edge Roll-Out

After a year or two working out the kinks, Vapor IO says it is ready to start rolling out its ambitious edge platform, dubbed Kinetic Edge, nationally. The company has raised funds through a Series C financing, with Crown Castle and Berkshire Partners putting up the money for the next stage of the company’s development.

Vapor IO’s dream has been to build a modular data center presence further out on the edge than ever before. They hope to bring latency for data hosted at the edge down to around the 10ms level, capable of supporting the next generation of cloud-enabled applications – whatever they may be. That means servers have to be just one hop from the last mile network, such as at the base of a cell tower — still something of a controversial plan in the industry.

As part of today’s move, Vapor IO has brought its initial deployments and work-in-progress out in Chicago, which had been called Project Volutus, fully in-house, taking over the assets from Crown Castle. They plan to initiate deployment across 13 sites this year, reach 48 by the end of next year, pass a hundred sometime in 2020, and continue on into every major US market.

While they aren’t giving out any numbers, the new financing will certainly give Vapor IO the resources to get the buildout underway and to expand its scope from there. They plan to continue leveraging the fiber and tower assets of investor Crown Castle as a stepping stone to a fully national footprint, and Berkshire’s involvement suggests that there are additional resources available should things go well.

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Categories: Datacenter · Financials · Wireless