Cloudflare Acquires Outerbase, Developer Database Co Used by Google, Pinterest, eBay

Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the leading connectivity cloud company, today announced the acquisition of Outerbase, a developer database company, to dramatically enhance the developer database experience across Cloudflare Workers. With this acquisition, building database-backed applications will be more approachable — enabling more teams to build and deploy full-stack, AI-enabled applications on Cloudflare’s global network.

Databases are key to building any modern application. And, with the rapid growth of AI and AI agents, more software will be built over the next five years than in the past 20. Almost all of those applications will need a database to maintain context, store conversations, and act on data. Ensuring that those databases can be built and managed quickly, easily, and at scale by developers of all backgrounds will help more developers to build those applications on Cloudflare.

 

“Businesses are racing to build AI-powered applications to be as productive, innovative, and competitive as possible. Our goal is to make it easy and accessible for any developer, regardless of expertise, to build database-backed applications that can scale,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. "Outerbase's technology and design expertise are an important factor in accelerating this improved developer experience.”

Outerbase itself is built on Cloudflare Workers, making it easy for the technology to rapidly be incorporated directly into Durable Objects, D1 and Cloudflare’s Agents SDK to provide easy to use interfaces and frameworks to interact with data and build database-dependent applications. With this acquisition, Cloudflare aims to democratize data access and make it easier for teams to manage databases without extensive SQL knowledge.

“At Outerbase, our mission has always been to make working with data easier for developers. Joining Cloudflare allows us to keep doing that, but faster and at a much larger scale," said Brandon Strittmatter, co-founder and CEO of Outerbase. "We’ve built Outerbase on top of Cloudflare, so this next step feels natural. Now, we get to take what we’ve built and make it part of the platform itself. I’m beyond excited about this opportunity — not just because of what it means for the team, but how as part of Cloudflare, we will shape the way people are building developer tools and AI applications."

Cloudflare’s Startup Fund Grows to $2B; 1M Devs Now Building with Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare’s “Workers Launchpad” Funding Program Grows to $2 Billion, Announces First Cohort of Startups

Funding program grows to 40 venture capital firms; first cohort of entrepreneurs building on Cloudflare Workers includes 25 startups, spanning 10 countries

Today, Cloudflare announced the Workers Launchpad Funding Program, originally launched in September at $1.25B, has grown to $2 billion in potential investment for startups building on Cloudflare Workers. This is an increase of 14 VC partners, including Kleiner Perkins, Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), and more, with an additional $750 million in less than two months, thanks to continued interest from VCs around the world. Cloudflare is also introducing the first cohort of startups participating in the program, featuring 25 companies from 10 countries.

Matthew Prince, Co-founder & CEO, Cloudflare

“When we set out to debut the Workers Launchpad, we were aiming for $250 million and surpassed that goal by a mile when we hit $1.25 billion. To reach $2 billion is a big deal, and one that proves the industry trusts in the potential of our global network” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare. “As we hit 1 million developers building and maintaining applications with Cloudflare, there’s no better time to continue investing in the developers using Cloudflare.”

The Cloudflare Workers Launchpad funding program initially launched in September 2022 to provide more than $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. In the days and weeks following, Cloudflare received a surge in interest globally from venture capitalists interested in joining the program. Cloudflare has now welcomed 14 additional venture capital partners into the program, adding regional expertise in Latin America and the Middle East to the pool of partners.

New venture partners include:

• 8VC: “We’re extremely excited to be backing the next generation of founders building at the edge on top of Cloudflare Workers. At 8VC, we partner with founders to build transformational technologies that create long-term value for the economy and society as a whole. We believe that serverless infrastructure will enable a new generation of transformational technologies in the area of multi-modal, data and AI driven applications,” said Bhaskar Ghosh (BG), Partner and CTO at 8VC.
• B Capital: “Workers provides the technology and infrastructure to founders excited to build next generation products, and B Capital is proud to work alongside of these great innovators to provide insights and capital to grow in a bold way from the start,” said Karen Page, General Partner at B Capital.
• Benhamou Global Ventures: “The next generation of apps will be built in a distributed way and at the edge to meet the consumer demands of latency, performance and scale. We are excited to partner with the Cloudflare Workers Fund and support the entrepreneurs building this next wave of enterprise startups,” said Yash Hemaraj, Partner at BGV.
• Chamaeleon: “At Chamaeleon, we look forward to collaborating with Cloudflare's Workers Launchpad, by bringing the firm, our unique quant & tech platform and our #KIN members to the forefront of our value-add to this pioneering ecosystem,” said Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Chamaeleon.
• Conversion Capital: “The Cloudflare Workers platform provides the building blocks to usher in a new era of serverless infrastructure, which is drastically reshaping large parts of the global economy run on software. We are excited to partner with Cloudflare and help accelerate this transition,” said Christian Lawless, General Partner at Conversion Capital.
• GGV: “We’ve been amazed by how quickly the Workers ecosystem has blossomed and are already seeing some of the most innovative founders we know building serverless products on top of or closely tied into Cloudflare. As more startups look to build on Workers from day one, we’re very excited about supporting the ecosystem,” said Dan Cahana, Investor at GGV Capital.
• IGNIA: “IGNIA’s focus of partnering with world-class tech entrepreneurs in Latin America aims to ensure the best technology can scale in and out of the region. Cloudflare Workers’ ability to have code running in minutes around the world gives so much potential to the entrepreneurs we want to see succeed,” said Alvaro Rodríguez Arregui, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at IGNIA.
• Kleiner Perkins: "For five decades, Kleiner Perkins has partnered with founders at the earliest stages of company formation. Many of these companies were enabled by advances in computing, from the PC, to mobile, to cloud. The Cloudflare Workers Launchpad program stands to advance the next wave - edge computing. We're excited to be a part of the global platform they are building to support builders in this rapidly growing ecosystem,” said Bucky Moore, partner, Kleiner Perkins.
• Nauta Capital: “Thrilled to partner with Cloudflare on this Workers Launchpad Funding Program. Nauta Capital has been keenly following the technology disruptions in enterprise infrastructure software for decades, and developers are increasingly interested in spending time on the 'core problem', leaving infrastructure to be handled for them. Cloudflare provides a powerful platform for some of these new ideas to take shape,” said Pratima Aiyagari, Venture Partner at Nauta Capital.
• Primary VC: “At Primary, we love building with founders from the ground up. Cloudflare Workers has the performance and scale that founders need to build a category-defining company and we're eager to partner with the teams using this powerful platform,” said Brian Schechter, Partner at Primary VC.
• Unusual Ventures: “Founders want to focus on creating products that matter. To do that, they need partners and infrastructure that allow them to efficiently run secure, scalable applications. That's why we're excited to partner with Cloudflare on Workers Launchpad: to enable founders and teams with the tools they need to reach product-market fit and beyond," said Wei Lien Dang, General Partner at Unusual Ventures.

Introducing the Workers Launchpad’s Fall 2022 Cohort

Additionally, Cloudflare is announcing the Fall cohort of 25 entrepreneurs from around the world, chosen from hundreds of applicants from over 30 countries. Cohort finalists include Apyfy, working on data privacy, and Grafbase, accelerating backend software development. The cohort includes startups from

Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, India, Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States. The cohort will have the opportunity to pitch our VC partners for investment, receive technical advice and support, participate in a virtual boot camp featuring sessions led by Cloudflare leaders and our VC partners, and showcase their businesses during a Demo Day.

"Apyfy aims to provide a privacy firewall that solves data privacy challenges in the health care, financial service and ecommerce industries. We use Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects to enable privacy-preserving computation across a global network. Cloudflare also solves our customers' data sovereignty and data residency requirements while providing massive compute power, and minimal latency,” said John Childs-Eddy, Cofounder of Apyfy.

"Grafbase is the easiest way to build and deploy GraphQL backends. We set out with Cloudflare thanks to their global network and serverless FaaS platform without cold starts, with the goal to simplify and speed up backend development for frontend and mobile developers," said Fredrik Björk, Founder and CEO of Grafbase.

“We’ve been blown away by the engagement and excitement the venture capital firms have shown when they saw the caliber of applicants,” said Mia Wang, M&A and Strategy Director at Cloudflare. “The selection process for the first cohort has been collaborative and we’re looking forward to connecting startups directly with VCs in the coming weeks.”

A Million Developers Building With Cloudflare

Earlier this week, Cloudflare shared that 1 million developers are building enterprise-ready applications with Cloudflare. With Workers features like Pages, Durable Objects, R2 and D1, and application services like rate limiting, load balancing, bot management and more, Cloudflare provides the tools to make building and maintaining applications cheaper, faster, and easier for developers.

To learn more, please check out the resources below:

Blog: Announcing the first Workers Launchpad cohort and growth of the program to [$2BN]

To apply to the Winter 2023 cohort, visit the Workers Launchpad page

Blog: Announcing the Workers Launchpad Funding Program

Blog: The Cloudflare Startup Plan, v2.0

Learn more about Cloudflare Workers

Get started with Cloudflare Workers

About Cloudflare

Cloudflare, Inc. (www.cloudflare.com / @cloudflare) is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare’s suite of products protect and accelerate any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures 2018 list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company in 2019. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Cloudflare has offices in Austin, TX, Champaign, IL, New York, NY, San Jose, CA, Seattle, WA, Washington, D.C., Toronto, Dubai, Lisbon, London, Munich, Paris, Beijing, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo.

Cloudflare Launches Invisible and Privacy Preserving Alternative to CAPTCHAs for the World to Use

Aims to save Internet users 500 years of time every day otherwise trying to pass a jumbled-up word or photo test

New API removes the need for CAPTCHAs by working behind the scenes to confirm a human is present during a web interaction

Cloudflare, Inc. the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today announced Turnstile, a simple, private way to replace CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) and help validate humanity across the Internet. Now any site owner can replace CAPTCHAs through a simple API, whether they’re a Cloudflare customer or not.

CAPTCHA has long been regarded as a terrible user experience that sacrifices privacy by harvesting user data. They typically come in the form of a challenge that is meant to be difficult for a computer to pass but simple for a human, such as identifying stretched letters or numbers, or things like crosswalks or stop signs. It is estimated that collectively, humans waste 500 years a day trying to solve CAPTCHAs. In addition to being the speed bump of the Internet, the tests have been critiqued for their lack of accessibility, assuming all Internet users have the physical and cognitive capabilities to solve them. Privacy is also at risk; for example, Google’s reCAPTCHA, which dominates the market, may ask for users to log in to their Google account as a form of verification. No one should have to give up private information when simply trying to prove they are not a robot. Cloudflare’s solution is a drop-in replacement for reCAPTCHA that preserves the user’s privacy.

“Cloudflare is taking one of the most hated pieces of Internet technology, and making it easier, more secure, and more private for everyone to use,” said Matthew Prince, Co-Founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “Similar to our 1.1.1.1 app that makes every user and the Internet safer, we’re excited to share Turnstile with developers of any size and anywhere, for an improved and more private end user experience.”

How It Works

Turnstile is a smarter, invisible CAPTCHA alternative. The solution automatically chooses from a rotating suite of browser challenges that work behind the scenes, looking for signals there is a human user. Turnstile can fine-tune the difficulty of the challenge, presenting harder challenges to visitors that exhibit non-human behaviors. Additionally, Turnstile recognizes Private Access Tokens from users on the latest versions of macOS or iOS, allowing Turnstile to validate a device with the help of the device vendor, and without collecting, touching or storing user device data.

Turnstile now has the same stable solve rate as previously used CAPTCHAs. With this technology, Cloudflare reduced their own use of CAPTCHA by 91% and reduced the visitor time spent in a challenge from an average of 32 seconds to an average of just one second to run the non-interactive challenges.

Turnstile is now available for any developer to use on their site, regardless of if they are a Cloudflare customer.

To learn more about Turnstile, visit our blog, and read more on Cloudflare’s innovation around CAPTCHAs:

• Announcing Turnstile, a user-friendly, privacy preserving alternative to CAPTCHA
• Private Access Tokens: eliminating CAPTCHAs on iPhones and Macs with open standards
• The end of the road for Cloudflare CAPTCHAs

About Cloudflare

Cloudflare, Inc. (www.cloudflare.com / @cloudflare) is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare’s suite of products protect and accelerate any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. 

Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures 2018 list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company in 2019. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Cloudflare has offices in Austin, TX, Champaign, IL, New York, NY, San Jose, CA, Seattle, WA, Washington, D.C., Toronto, Dubai, Lisbon, London, Munich, Paris, Beijing, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo.

Cloudflare Announces $1.25B Funding Program for Developer Building on Workers Platform

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

Partnership with 26 venture capital firms will provide support to startups building on Cloudflare Workers

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.

Matthew Prince, Co-founder & CEO, Cloudflare

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 Partner Firms 

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.

To learn more about the Cloudflare Workers Fund, please check out the resources below:

To apply, visit the Workers Launchpad Funding Program page

Blog: Announcing the Workers Launchpad Funding Program

Blog: The Cloudflare Startup Plan, v2.0

Learn more about Cloudflare Workers

Get started with Cloudflare Workers

About Cloudflare

Cloudflare, Inc. (www.cloudflare.com / @cloudflare) is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare’s suite of products protect and accelerate any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures 2018 list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company in 2019. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Cloudflare has offices in Austin, TX, Champaign, IL, New York, NY, San Jose, CA, Seattle, WA, Washington, D.C., Toronto, Dubai, Lisbon, London, Munich, Paris, Beijing, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo.