It was at John Battelle’s Web 2.0 summit, Marissa Mayer (then with Google) in a presentation to the audience pointed out that the faster Google could serve up search queries, happier the customers. “You might say that it’s obvious, but it is something bigger,” she said. Amazon found out that their revenues increased 1 percent for every 100 milliseconds. Walmart said that improvement of a second led to two percent improvement in conversions, a huge gain in their revenues. According to research from Gomez.com and Akamai, nearly half of web users want a site to load in 2 seconds or they are gone. And when it comes to mobile, patience isn’t a virtue either.

Enter, Twin Prime, a company co-founded by Kartik Chandrayana & Satish Raghunath, and the latest member of True Ventures family of startups wanting to reshape the world. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company today announced a $9.5 million round of funding from True and DFJ Ventures along with participation from Milliways Ventures and Moment Ventures. I have joined the board of the company along with always jovial and very smart, Bubba Murarka from DFJ Ventures. The company also came out of stealth today.

What is Twin Prime

Well, it is a pair of prime numbers that have a prime gap of two. It was the subject of an unsolved math problem (Are there an infinite number of twin primes?) till recently and it was the reason why Kartik and Satish picked it as a name for the company. Incidentally, the very week True seed funded the company was the week Yitang “Tom” Zhang announced a proof for the twin prime conjecture! But in the context of this piece, it is a company that has developed a set of technologies that improve the performance of mobile apps.

Performance in mobile apps is a function of several factors involving the last mile – the wireless network, the app itself, the operating system, the device and many others. The key to this problem is to discover the parameters that truly matter and then using this knowledge to adapt data delivery strategies on the fly as a user comes online.

To discover the parameters that matter, Twin Prime continually measures and analyzes data for each mobile operating context of significance. Then to impact data delivery, the company picks the right way to deliver the best performance. The more Twin Prime is used, the better it is informed and the better performance gets.

“Seen another way, we see a bag of tools when we look at the various technologies available on the handset and at the backend. What we are injecting into this mix is the ability to pick the right tool for a mobile context,” says Satish, who in past life worked for Juniper Networks. “It is about recognizing the need to be adaptive to the real-time mobile context.”

AN APP SIZED PROBLEM

The company’s core technology features a cloud-based component called Twin Prime Accelerator and it is metaphorically in the last mile between the app and the network. The apps have a tiny bit of Twin Prime code that allows the accelerator to better predict network conditions and optimize the performance. It can help app understand and deliver performance based on say whether people are using WiFi, 3g, LTE or how strong are the signals. It gives a sense of intelligence to the app and enables a seamless experience, overcoming challenges of volatility in latency. By the way, on cellular networks, nearly, 70 percent of latency occurs in the last mile.

Twin Prime has been accelerating production traffic from several apps with dozens more in trials and seeing traffic from all over the globe. What is amazing is that end-users experienced up to 2 seconds latency cut on both Wifi and cellular traffic. Frontback, a social media app and a Twin Prime customer, saw the time spent in app go up by 50 percent on top of their existing CDN platform. In addition download speeds increased by 50 percent on average world-wide.

Like Marissa Mayer said — speed matters. Kartik and Satish, officially welcome to the True Family.

PS: Check out TwinPrime website and try out their solution.