The company was named afterakamai, which means 'clever', or more colloquially, 'cool' inHawaiian. Co-founderDaniel M. Lewin found the term in a Hawaiian–English dictionary after a colleague's suggestion.[7]
Akamai Technologies entered the 1998MIT $50K competition with a business proposition based on their research onconsistent hashing[8] and was selected as one of the finalists.[9] By August 1998, they had developed a working prototype, and with the help of Jonathan Seelig andRandall Kaplan, they took steps to incorporate the company.[10] Akamai Technologies was incorporated on August 20, 1998.[11]
In late 1998 and early 1999, a group of business professionals and scientists joined the founding team—most notably,Paul Sagan, former president of New Media forTime Inc., andGeorge Conrades, former chairman and chief executive officer ofBBN Corp. and senior vice president of US operations forIBM. Conrades became chief executive officer of Akamai in April 1999.[12][13][14] The company launched its commercial service in April 1999 and was listed on the NASDAQ Stock Market from October 29, 1999.[15]
Arabic news networkAl Jazeera was an Akamai customer from March 28, 2003 to April 2, 2003, when Akamai decided to end the relationship,[18] which the network's English-language managing editor claimed was due to "political pressure".[19]
In 2005, Paul Sagan was named chief executive officer of Akamai, taking over from Conrades. Sagan worked to differentiate Akamai from its competitors by expanding its breadth of services.[14] Under his leadership, it grew to $1.37 billion in revenue.[20]
In July 2007, Akamai was added to theS&P 500 index.[21]
In 2013, co-founder Tom Leighton was elected chief executive officer, replacing Sagan.[22]
In 2013, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged a former executive at Akamai Technologies for illegally tipping non-public information about the company's financial predicament as part of the insider trading scheme operated by now-imprisoned Galleon Management hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam.[23] In 2014 it was reported that theNational Security Agency andFederal Bureau of Investigation usedFacebook's Akamai CDN to collect information on Facebook users.[24]
On February 9, 2021, Akamai announced that it would reorganize into two internal groups – Security Technology and Edge Technology. It also re-established the role of chief technology officer and named Robert Blumofe to that role.[25] Long-time chief security officer (CSO) Andy Ellis announced he would leave in March 2021.[26]
Akamai's headquarters are inKendall Square. It started inTechnology Square and later expanded to multiple buildings inCambridge Center. It consolidated its offices in a purpose-built building at 145 Broadway in December 2019.[27]
In February 2025, Akamai was chosen as the strategic cloud computing provider by one of the world's largest technology companies, with a multi-year commitment to spend over $100 million on cloud infrastructure services.[28] The company's cloud infrastructure services primarily consist of compute and storage solutions developed based onLinode, a cloud hosting provider acquired by Akamai for $900 million in 2022.[29][30]
The Akamai Intelligent Platform[31] is a distributed cloud computing platform that operates worldwide, a network of over approximately 365,000 servers in more than 135 countries.[32] These servers reside on roughly 1,350 of the world's networks, gathering real-time information about traffic, congestion, and trouble spots.[32] Each Akamai server is equipped with proprietary software that uses complex algorithms to process requests from nearby users.[31]
The content delivery process begins with a user submitting a request to abrowser. When a user enters a URL, aDNS request is triggered to Akamai's authoritative DNS,[33] and anIP address is retrieved. With the IP address, the browser can then directly contact the Akamai edge server for subsequent requests.[34] In acontent delivery network (CDN) structure, thedomain name of the URL is translated by the mapping system[35] into the IP address of anedge server to serve the content to the user.[31]
Akamai delivers web content over its Intelligent Platform by transparentlymirroring elements such asHTML,CSS, software downloads, andmedia objects from customers' servers. The Akamai server is automatically chosen depending on the type of content and the user's network location. The servers are located in more than 200 countries and territories.[36] Receiving content from a server nearer to the user allows for faster downloads and less vulnerability tonetwork congestion. Akamai claims to provide better scalability by delivering the content over the last mile from servers close to end-users, avoiding themiddle-mile bottleneck of the Internet.[37] The Download Delivery product line includes HTTP downloads for large downloadable objects, a customizable application for consumers, and analytics tools with metrics that monitor and report on the download process.[38]
On October 9, 2013, Akamai announced its Open Initiative at the 2013 Akamai Edge Conference. OPEN allows customers and partners to develop and customize how they interact with the Akamai Intelligent Platform. Its key components include system and development operations integration, real-timebig data integration, and a single-point user interface.[41]
US$3.99 billion (2024)
US$533 million (2024)
