Claro Colombia customers can seamlessly play all the major titles on US servers with Haste's multi-path technology

“Video games don’t cause violence-lag does”. Virtually every gamer in the history of gaming must have uttered this refrain at one time or another in response to attempts by pencil-pushing bureaucrats to ban games. - Well, if lag is the problem, the good folks at Haste may have found a solution.

Haste was founded in 2015 by gamers to solve a problem that all gamers face: latency and packet loss in online gaming. Their solution: an application-agnostic network optimization service with a focus on gaming. Through software-defined networking, Haste’s almost-God’s eye view of network latency allows them to detect supported gameplay and take over traffic on supported servers located in North America, Latin America, Europe as well as the Middle East. Their multipath technology allows them to locate and manage internet “fast paths” on demand, replicate packets and then reassemble them at the point of the game server. By offering the fastest roundtrip times available, gamers can thus play live games online with minimal latency, jitter, and without any packet loss.

Lynn Perry took over the role of CEO in may 2018. The company graduated from the Techstars Cloud accelerator program two years earlier in 2016 and closed their first seed round. However, as a startup building an entirely new product from scratch, they relied on a bare metal servers, dedicated bandwidth - a costly proposition for a venture-backed startup. Perry’s joining the team coincided with an evolution of the company’s operating model from what she calls “the F350 of networks” towards more fine-tuned networks made possible through the flexibility of VMs. “It was a bit of a learning curve” explains Perry, “by learning more about how our technology works, and innovated on it, we moved towards a lower-cost model”. 

Haste currently supports around two dozen games, including popular titles, Fortnite, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, PUBG, Counterstrike, and League of Legends. Gamers can simply start a 14-day trial by visiting their website directly. According to Perry, the company already generates revenue from thousands of subscriptions to Haste Pro. However, the Atlanta-based startup is now going beyond its current direct-to-consumer revenue model thanks to a game changing partnership with Ericsson.

Perry and her team saw an opportunity in the newfound interest of ISPs and Telcos to expand into gaming. According to Perry, Ericsson played a crucial role as both a business partner, scaling through their sales and technical experts, as well as a technical partner, launching Haste across the Ericsson Edge Gravity edge compute network.