Inside Cloudflare: From 2009 to Now Into a $332 million business
Startup Type:
Headquarter: San Francisco, USA
Current Status: Active (public since 2019)
Founders: Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn, Lee Holloway
Founded Year: 2009
Investors: Venrock, NEA, Fidelity
Funding Raised: $332 million
What Is the business model of Cloudflare?
Web infrastructure and security company providing CDN, DDoS protection, DNS, and cloud networking services on a freemium model
How Cloudflare got started?
Started after Prince’s graduate project tracking spam turned into a broader mission to help websites run faster and safer, launched at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 offering CDN and security to any site via a simple DNS change
what growth strategy has Cloudflare followed?
Attracted millions of sites by offering a free basic tier for CDN/security, leveraging scale to continuously improve performance, and upselling enterprise features — eventually serving a significant portion of global internet traffic
what are the top products/features of Cloudflare
Cloudflare CDN network, Cloudflare DNS, Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare Zero Trust security solutions
what was the biggest challenge faced by Cloudflare?
Battling constant cyber attacks (DDoS) from malicious actors while maintaining uptime, and controversies over providing service to hateful or criminal websites testing its content neutrality stance