Cloudflare Announces $1.25 Billion Workers Launchpad Funding Program to Help Startups Grow Their Businesses

Matthew Prince, Co-founder & CEO, Cloudflare

India, September 2022 — Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today announced a new funding program for startups in partnership with leading venture capital investors. The Workers Launchpad Funding Program will provide up to $1.25 billion of financing to startups building applications on Cloudflare Workers, a highly scalable serverless computing platform that allows developers to build or augment apps without configuring or maintaining infrastructure.

Cloudflare is partnering with 26 leading venture capital firms including: Altimeter Capital, Altos Ventures, Amplify Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, boldstart ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Decibel, Emergence Capital, FirstMark, Greylock Partners, IVP, Lightspeed, Meritech, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Norwest Venture Partners, Pear, Root Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Signal Peak, Silverton Partners, StepStone Group, Threshold Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners, Venrock, and Vertex Ventures US to support developers using Cloudflare Workers to build their applications. Any private company globally that is building on Cloudflare Workers is eligible to apply for the program. If selected by the participating venture capital firms, companies may receive a cash investment from these participating firms, as well as mentorship and support from Cloudflare.

“If there’s one thing venture capitalists look for in the companies they fund, it’s the potential to achieve significant scale. Startups that build on Cloudflare Workers are building on a platform made to automatically support serious scale,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder, and CEO of Cloudflare. “While we can provide the technology, we’re thrilled to partner with some of the leading venture capital firms on the Workers Launchpad Funding Program, who will potentially invest more than a billion dollars in funding towards great startups built on Cloudflare Workers as they scale.”

Today, hundreds of thousands of developers around the world rely on Cloudflare Workers to build and deploy applications without configuring or maintaining costly infrastructure. With Cloudflare’s network spanning more than 275 cities in over 100 countries around the world, developers can deploy code close to their users, bringing the speed, performance, and scale of Cloudflare to their customers. Since 2017, more than 500,000 developers have built on Cloudflare’s developer platform and launched more than three million applications.

Startups applying for the program will be eligible for potential investment from investors, the Cloudflare Startup Enterprise Plan, which includes Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare for Teams, Cloudflare Stream, and additional core security and performance offerings, as well as exclusive events.

Companies see success building with Workers

In 2021 Cloudflare acquired Zaraz, representing its first acquisition of a company built on its own technology, Cloudflare Workers. “When we began building Zaraz, we chose to rely on Cloudflare Workers because we understood how critical a decision it was to find the right platform that could help us launch faster and also scale with our business,” said Yair Dovrat, product manager for Zaraz at Cloudflare and former CEO and co-founder of Zaraz. “We were blown away by the developer experience, performance, and security that Workers offered and ultimately joined the Cloudflare team to help push the standard for a better Internet more holistically.”

“Our use of Workers has greatly expanded, and it’s now become a critical part of our software. Workers performs a lot of key functions for our app, and we’re looking into more potential uses right now,” said Sergey Tselovalnikov, API Platform Lead at Canva.

__Comments from Partners __

• Amplify Partners: “Edge computing is the next major paradigm shift for developers, and we believe that Workers is at the forefront of this shift. We look forward to seeing Workers enable a new class of edge-native companies, and we’re excited to invest in these companies,” said Renee Shah, Partner at Amplify Partners.

• Bain Capital Ventures: “Discovering and developing the next great leaders is Bain Capital Ventures’ number one goal. Cloudflare has created a platform that simplifies the development experience while maintaining cost-effectiveness to help empower startups and entrepreneurs, both big and small. It’s a natural fit for the next generation of founders,” said Enrique Salem, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures.

• boldstart ventures: “Over the past year, we have been seeing a rapidly increasing amount of startups building their products upon Cloudflare Workers. In fact, we have invested in Liveblocks, which uses Workers and Durable Objects under the hood to help deliver a great end user experience to developers (their users). We are excited to continue supporting the growing Workers ecosystem and the innovative products that will be built on top in the future,” said Shomik Ghosh, Partner at boldstart ventures.

• Cowboy Ventures: “Cloudflare is redefining how developers build on the edge and think about scale. We’re excited to help unearth that potential for scale and support companies built on the Workers platform,” said Amanda Robson, Partner at Cowboy Ventures.

• Decibel: “We see massive potential for the innovation that will arise when entrepreneurs are able to focus on ideas rather than infrastructure thanks to Cloudflare’s technologies,” said Jon Sakoda, Founding Partner at Decibel.

• Greylock: “Cloudflare’s Workers ecosystem holds incredible potential for the next generation of apps. Creating the apps of tomorrow in a serverless environment is going to change the way users access and interact with technology, and we’re excited to support the entrepreneurs taking advantage of it,” said Jerry Chen, General Partner at Greylock.

• Lightspeed: “The Cloudflare Workers’ platform represents a step change in how developers can build for the cloud and the edge. As long-time investors in the enterprise ecosystem, Lightspeed is excited to support a new generation of developers innovating on top of Cloudflare Workers’ performance, reliability, and scale,” said Arif Janmohamed, Partner at Lightspeed.

• Meritech: “Working with companies like Datadog and Snowflake, we know the value of strong infrastructure and the challenges that Cloudflare Workers can help solve when it comes to deploying at the edge,” said Alex Clayton, General Partner at Meritech.

• New Enterprise Associates: “We’re proud to have partnered with Cloudflare early on and continue to be impressed with the company’s growth and impactful initiatives at this stage of their journey. Cloudflare Workers is set to attract the same caliber of founders who are building with a long-term vision for both infrastructure and the end-user,” said Scott Sandell, Managing General Partner at NEA, and Member of the Board of Directors at Cloudflare.

• Norwest Venture Partners: “Serverless is the future of software development. A new era of innovation is being ushered in by Cloudflare Workers that enables developers to spend more time building and less time worrying about maintaining infrastructure,” said Rama Sekhar, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners.

• Root Ventures: “The founders we work with are all solving hard technical problems. So, I think incidentally, we’ve found them gravitating toward technologies like Rust,  WASM, and Cloudflare Workers, that maximize performance and productivity,” said Lee Edwards, Partner at Root Ventures.

• Scale Venture Partners: “AWS EC2 changed everything when it launched 16 years ago. I see Workers, and the broader Cloudflare portfolio, in a similar place today. Serverless is the way to build apps in 2022,” said Eric Anderson, Partner at Scale Venture Partners.

• StepStone Group: “In a world where every team, company, and product need to be global in nature from the start, Cloudflare’s platform is creating a new standard for scale and availability, and we’re excited to see more businesses built on it,” said John Avirett, Partner at StepStone Group.

• Threshold Ventures: “Threshold supports entrepreneurs with bold visions taking on big markets. Cloudflare Workers is a powerful tool that can help them build products that scale to serve those markets globally. We’re excited to partner in the Cloudflare Workers Fund and look forward to seeing what teams using this technology build,” said Emily Melton, Managing Partner, and Co-Founder at Threshold Ventures.

• U.S. Venture Partners: “Cloudflare has a strong following in the developer community, and we have no doubt that their Workers platform will continue to attract the best and brightest entrepreneurs to build tomorrow’s most popular apps,” said Dafina Toncheva, General Partner at U.S. Venture Partners.

• Venrock: “We’re proud to have been investors in great companies like Cloudflare at the very beginning. We look for companies that can scale and Cloudflare Workers provides a powerful platform to allow startups with great ideas to meet any level of customer demand,” said Bryan Roberts, Partner at Venrock.

• Vertex Ventures US: “Workers is core infrastructure for the modern developer, and we are thrilled to see more startups innovating with Cloudflare technologies,” said Chase Roberts, Principal at Vertex Ventures US.