Instart Logic Wants a Smoking-Fast Internet

Raghu Venkat was at his breaking point in 2010. After he spent months helping to fine-tune the analytics software behind Aster Data Systems, his bosses ordered him to take a two-week vacation and handed him a $1,500 prepaid debit card as a bonus for his hard work. He spent the money on a massive widescreen TV and a couple of video game systems, making his apartment the new home base for co-workers Manav Mital and Hariharan Kolam. Soon, Venkat was obsessed with games like Bioshock. He and his fellow engineers and gaming fans grew frustrated, though, when it took the game consoles what seemed like ages to download new games or update old ones. “You have Netflix, and the movie starts streaming right away,” says Mital. “We started thinking about why one thing was instant and why the other one took forever.”

Out of that desire for speedier gaming and online services came the idea for Instart Logic, the Mountain View (Calif.)-based company the trio quit their jobs to found. Instart’s software, which includes a monitoring system implanted in browsers, determines what users tend to look for on a given website and breaks desired Web pages into prioritized chunks. On a site selling shoes, Instart cuts the quality and trims the file sizes of images when first loading a page so pictures, menus, and descriptions on the first screen people see will appear almost instantly. In the background it then fills in the rest of the data. The technology proves particularly useful on mobile devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones, which often rely on slower Internet connections. “Four years ago, this problem didn’t really exist,” says Mital, Instart’s chief executive officer. “But now there are so many mobile devices and more complex websites, and people can’t get to what they want fast enough.”