StackPath Closing Down Company, Will Liquidate Assets

StackPath announced it is shutting down the company and will liquidate its assets. Employees posted comments on LinkedIn last week, and now the news is official. Company investors had been trying to offload the company for at least 18 months, with multiple vendors telling me they looked at the business but weren’t interested. Founded by the former chairman and CEO of SoftLayer Technologies, which was acquired by IBM in 2016, StackPath raised $180 million and acquired MaxCDN (SMB CDN), Fireblade (WAF), Cloak (VPN) and Staminus (DDoS) to launch the company. Read my launch blog post here.

In 2017, the company acquired CDN Highwinds, which had already acquired BandCon and in 2017, StackPath merged with Server Density to enter the monitoring business. In 2020, StackPath raised $216 million in a Series B round from Juniper and Cox to get into the edge computing business, suggesting that IoT, 5G and OTT video would be the driving demand. Last year, StackPath exited the CDN business, with Akamai acquiring “approximately” 100 enterprise CDN contracts from the company.

StackPath’s downfall was a constant change in management, no core product focus, no clear go-to-market strategy, no understanding of customer needs and calling themselves the “world’s first platform” for providing compute and services at the edge, which they weren’t. At one time, StackPath’s technology was the enhanced security option for Eero’s mesh Wi-Fi system, which StackPath was banking on to grow its revenue. However, that option disappeared when Amazon bought Eero in 2019.

There was also a lot of in-fighting between management and investors and far too many egos at the top. Between 2017 and 2019, I hosted multiple meetings with some of StackPath’s management team and was not impressed. The company was fast and loose with its numbers, overinflated revenue, customer deployments and other aspects of the business. By the time new management took over in 2020, I believed that the damage had already been done and that StackPath wasn’t saveable. For clarity, I last talked to StackPath’s management team in 2021, so my comments don’t pertain to all the new employees running the company with whom I have not interacted.

StackPath sent out its last invoices to customers on June 12th and is no longer offering technical support, which is a crummy way to close down a business when some customers are going to have technical questions.