Section.io puts down Boulder roots, raises new equity round

BOULDER — Section.io Inc., a 4-year-old Australian company whose founders recently moved to Boulder, has pulled in a new $800,000 funding round as the firm aims to launch its content-delivery network into the U.S. market.

Section.io CEO Stewart McGrath said Monday that the money will be used primarily to build out a sales and marketing force in the United States.

McGrath said he couldn’t disclose all of the investors involved in the round, but did note that it was led by Boulder-based Tahoma Ventures. The company also counts among its investors and board members former SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin.

Founded in 2012, section.io provides a content-delivery network, or CDN, with software-like characteristics that allows developers and website engineers to treat the CDN as software in their development processes rather than a physical network.

CDNs are a sort of middleman in the Internet between people serving up websites and end-users that help ensure speed, availability and security of the sites to a broad audience. McGrath said that, unlike section.io’s product, many CDNs don’t provide consistency between the test and production environments, hindering developers’ efforts as they try to continuously and rapidly improve or add features to their sites.

While section.io has been successful in the Australian market, the company is going through the Techstars Boulder startup accelerator this spring — even though it’s at a more advanced stage than most companies going through accelerators. The privately held company does not disclose revenue, but boasts among its customers Nike, Thrifty and Mazda.

McGrath said the choice to go through Techstars was made to help tap into the accelerator’s professional network as his company tries to “parachute” into the U.S. market. But he said the company’s leaders are also excited about the mentorship that comes with going through an accelerator.

“I think we’re of the view that there’s always room for acceleration no matter what stage a company’s at,” McGrath said.

Section.io is working out of Techstars currently, but McGrath said the company’s intent is to maintain its headquarters in Boulder upon graduation while keeping an engineering office in Australia. He said the nine-person company could add 10 to 15 new hires in Boulder over the next 12 months.