StackPath, a year-old Dallas company that’s been buying up security-focused startups to build its own business, is at it again.
The latest acquisition is Highwinds, a content delivery network (CDN) specialist, purchased for an undisclosed amount.
CDN companies like Akamai (AKAM), Limelight (LLNW), and Cloudflare, put network servers around the world in strategic locations. The goal is to speed up delivery of content over the web by caching, or storing, popular videos and other material closer to likely consumers. But, because CDNs themselves “see” so much web traffic, they can also act as sentries to spot malignant content.
In addition to the companies mentioned above, big cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft (MSFT), and Google (GOOG) field their own CDNs.
By July, when co-founder and chief executive officer Lance Crosby officially launched StackPath, it had already snapped up MaxCDN, another content delivery network with 19 points of presence around the world. Highwinds, Winter Park, Florida, is larger than MaxCDN and claims customers including game platform power Valve Corp., PBS, and Bose.
StackPath has already bought Fireblade, a web application firewall; Staminus, which works to stop distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks; and Cloak, a virtual private network that secures Apple (AAPL) iOs and Mac applications.
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StackPath’s goal is to make it easy for customers to use all or some of its products to protect data and applications whether they run in their own data centers or in Amazon (AMZN) Web Services, Microsoft (MSFT), or IBM (IBM) SoftLayer, or other clouds. Crosby, for the record, was SoftLayer chief executive before selling it to IBM for $2 billion nearly four years ago.
StackPath has nearly $180 million in funding, $150 million of which comes from Boston-based private equity company ABRY Partners.
News of the deal has been communicated to employees, according to an email viewed by Fortune, but not announced publicly.