Of the many challenges involved in operating a large-scale web service, dealing with sudden traffic surges is among the most difficult. One of the newest companies to focus on that challenge is a Mountain View-based startup called Webscale Networks Inc. that raised $12 million in funding this morning to fuel its work.

The investment was led by Mohr Davidow Ventures and saw the participation of three other institutional backers including early-stage fund Benhamou Global Ventures, Grotech and Silicon Valley Bank. Webscale will use the capital to widen the adoption of its namesake application delivery service, which enables organizations to scale their sites according to user demand without most of the manual work historically involved in the task.

The system accomplishes this by harnessing predictive analytics algorithms to assess the traffic profile of the web assets that it’s powering, forecast future spikes and automatically provision the infrastructure necessary to support the extra activity. Webscale says that its platform tweaks the resource allocation process on every occasion to account for factors like the geographic distribution of requests. For instance, if a website attracts an unexpected surge of visitors from Paris, then the software will spin up new servers and application delivery controllers in the nearest available French data center. The startup claims that it also supports leading infrastructure-as-a-service platforms to let customers protect applications they’ve chosen to run in the cloud rather than their on-premise infrastructure.

Webscale mainly targets midsize e-commerce companies with a few tens or hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, but its platform could theoretically come handy in other industries as well. The company says product bookings have more than doubled over the past years on the back of new customer wins in international markets and key retail segments such as fashion.

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