Telstra invests in US application delivery services provider

Telstra's venture capital arm Telstra Ventures has invested in United States application delivery services provider Instart Logic, boosting the company's ability to expand throughout the APAC region.

The Palo Alto, California-based company provides economical solutions for improving its customers' websites in terms of user experience and performance, as well as providing a multi-layered security approach to protect websites against breaches of cybersecurity, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

"Given mobility continues to be one of the top trends in the technology space, we are excited to start the year with an investment in Instart Logic. Their end-to-end application delivery platform combines machine learning for performance and security with a CDN for delivery," said Mark Sherman, managing director of Telstra Ventures.

Telstra CEO Andrew Penn recently called the rise of machine-to-machine (M2M) learning one of the three drivers of innovation.

"Instart Logic's platform uses a machine learning-based approach to better predict user behaviour, downloading only the relevant aspects of a webpage and enabling users to view and interact with a page before all elements have finished loading," Sherman explained.

"These techniques are highly beneficial in a mobile-first world, as they can reduce the download size of a typical application by more than 30 percent."

According to Instart Logic CEO Manav Mital, Telstra's investment in the company will help it expand into the Asia-Pacific region.

"We welcome the investment from Telstra, who we believe will be a strong partner as we expand our business outside of the United States," Mital said.

"Asia has emerged as a global hub for mobile app businesses, and we do see a lot of opportunities for us in the region by leveraging Telstra's rich experience and footprint in the Asia-Pacific region."

Mital added that over 500 websites currently make use of Instart Logic's application delivery service, with users in the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Telstra has been focusing on investing in tech companies worldwide over the past two years; in March 2015, Telstra Ventures made a multimillion-dollar investment in Taiwanese video big data and analytics company Gorilla Technology Group, saying the company could provide beneficial video analytic software solutions for the government, security, broadcast, and retail sectors.

This followed Telstra Ventures announcing an equity investment in Elemental, a software-defined video solutions provider for multi-screen content delivery, in December 2014, and its minority equity stake in Panviva, an Australian cloud-computing business process guidance software provider.

In August 2014, Telstra also invested $270 million into Silicon Valley-based video-streaming and analytics company Ooyala, taking control of the company in the process. This was followed in September by Telstra contributing to a $50 million Series D funding round for ecommerce platform Bigcommerce, and joining a number of other backers in a funding round for DocuSign, an electronic signatures company.

At the end of last year, Telstra also pledged AU$10 million over five years to aid in the development of the world's first silicon-based quantum computer at the University of New South Wales' Centre for Quantum Computation and Communications Technology, with Penn saying the investment reaffirmed the telco's commitment to making innovation and technological advancement a priority.

"Telstra is ready and willing to play a role in building for the future," Penn said in December.

"We must come together to plan for future generations through technological advancements. This partnership is a solid demonstration of this commitment."