Cloudflare Launches Precursor, a First Privacy-First Defense Platform Against Bad Bots

• Built on one of the world’s largest networks, Precursor is the only defense of its kind to replace disruptive checkpoints to stop evasive bots without slowing down users

Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the leading connectivity cloud company, today announced the general availability of Precursor, a next-generation, continuous behavioral validation engine for bot management. Built directly on Cloudflare’s edge, Precursor runs seamlessly inside web browsers to monitor entire user sessions in order to detect bot automation. Unlike traditional, static CAPTCHAs, it analyzes ongoing interactions in real time to catch advanced bots, improving detection precision without interrupting legitimate users.

For the first time, automated bot traffic has eclipsed human activity on the Internet, now generating roughly 57% of all web requests. This milestone emphasizes a seismic evolution from an Internet built for human clicks to a digital landscape now dominated by AI agents. For organizations and everyday consumers, this means that legacy defenses are blind to a new breed of automated threats that drive up infrastructure costs, manipulate inventory, and compromise data. While a modern bot can easily fake a single action to pass a one-time security check, replicating an entire human journey remains a massive engineering hurdle. To protect the integrity of the global Internet, organizations must move away from static, point-in-time defenses and embrace continuous behavioral validation - analyzing telemetry across an entire session to unmask automated imposters trying to blend into the crowd.

"Traditional security checks look at a single moment in time, but modern bots have gotten smart enough to fake their way through the front door," said Dane Knecht, CTO of Cloudflare. "Instead of just checking an ID at the gate, we are looking at behavior over the entire visit. This makes life seamless for real users, while making it incredibly difficult and expensive for bad actors to fake human behavior. Cloudflare already protects users billions of times a day at critical moments like login and checkout, but until now, the space between those moments was a black box. With Precursor, we’re now eliminating that blindspot."

Now generally available, Precursor provides a session-level view of site activity by continuously collecting robust browser signals to block unwanted automated traffic through:

• Privacy-Led Defense: Built to protect end user confidentiality, Precursor logs aggregate behavioral patterns rather than recording specific user inputs. For example, keyboard activity is recorded exclusively as timing rhythm and cadence - never capturing actual keystrokes.
• Zero-Code, One-Click Setup: Precursor is enabled with one click, automatically allowing Cloudflare to inject a compact, dynamic script passing through the network, requiring no modifications to underlying code. The script evaluates interaction trail dimensions such as mouse movement, scrolling rhythm, typing cadence, clipboard activity, and page visibility duration.
• A Real-Time Analysis Engine: Cloudflare's servers instantly unpack the telemetry data sent from a user's browser and scan it for signs of faked or computer-generated activity. We then validate whether interaction streams map rationally to human behavior, such as cross-referencing that pointer activity aligns with page visibility or text fields are focused during typing events.
• Session-Long Security Measures: Unlike traditional defense challenges that reset per every request, Precursor continuously evaluates the visitor’s user journey across a web or single page application. Automated agents cannot reset their behavioral signatures by refreshing a page, allowing defensive algorithms to adjust a session's Bot Score with compounding context.

To learn more, please check out the resources below:

Blog: Introducing Precursor: detecting agentic behavior with continuous client-side signals


Cloudflare Precursor

About Cloudflare

Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET) is the leading connectivity cloud company. It empowers organizations to make their employees, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and cost. Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud delivers the most full-featured, unified platform of cloud-native products and developer tools, so any organization can gain the control they need to work, develop, and accelerate their business.

Powered by one of the world’s largest and most interconnected networks, Cloudflare blocks billions of threats online for its customers every day. It is trusted by millions of organizations – from the largest brands to entrepreneurs and small businesses to nonprofits, humanitarian groups, and governments across the globe.

Learn more about Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud at cloudflare.com/connectivity-cloud. Learn more about the latest Internet trends and insights at radar.cloudflare.com.

Cloudflare Collaborates With Leading Browsers to Develop a Privacy-First Protocol For the Global Internet

Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), , the leading connectivity cloud company, today announced a new initiative with major Web browsers - Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge - committing to developing and submitting for standardization a privacy-preserving protocol to help humans and bots prove that their traffic is not malicious. As the Internet shifts from human-driven clicks to agent activity, website operators must now figure out how to stop aggressive automated traffic, without resorting to invasive tracking. This initiative will lay the foundation for a more frictionless, secure, and private experience for every Internet user and website owner alike.

“The way we interact with the Internet is facing a fundamental shift. Normal everyday tasks like ordering food previously required a user to personally navigate menus and payment gateways. Now, autonomous agents are starting to orchestrate these workflows on behalf of people," said Dane Knecht, CTO of Cloudflare. "As AI-powered traffic becomes widespread, existing tools to support its use are too generic and coarse. Now this collaboration lets us eliminate the friction caused by security protocols for every visitor - whether they are human or agent - without sacrificing privacy."

For decades, website operators have relied on a patchwork of imperfect defense mechanisms to manage automated abuse, but these imperfect techniques are increasingly failing to keep pace with modern threats. Now, with the explosion of Generative AI, the battlefield has shifted yet again. Malicious automation is more widespread, sophisticated, and economically damaging to site owners. As we move toward an era of agentic AI, the line between human behavior and bot activity is blurring, leaving the digital world with an unprecedented privacy problem. When websites attempt to verify that a request originates from a legitimate human or authorized bot, the traditional solutions - forced logins and invasive tracking - compromise user trust.

“In commerce, every extra challenge, delay, or false positive can turn a purchase into an abandoned cart. Merchants need effective protections against automated abuse, but buyers shouldn’t have to pay for them with unnecessary friction or invasive tracking. Shopify is proud to help develop PACT as an open, privacy-preserving standard that can help the millions of businesses on our platform distinguish legitimate shoppers and authorized agents from abusive traffic while preserving buyer privacy." – Ilya Grigorik, Distinguished Engineer at Shopify.

Private Access Control Tokens (PACT) are designed to allow sites with strong knowledge of “personhood” to issue anonymous tokens. A user's browser can then provide these tokens to other sites to prove that a human is in the loop, reducing the need for annoying and clunky captchas or invasive tracking. PACT is designed so that sites cannot leverage it to track or identify users or their browsing history.

"The health of the web depends on effective, interoperable, privacy-preserving tools that enable sites to combat abuse without unnecessary user friction. Microsoft is excited to collaborate on developing new standards and helping ensure their deployment across the open web." – Erik Anderson, Director of Engineering, Web Platform at Microsoft Edge.

"Mozilla is committed to defending openness and user privacy on the web. An avalanche of automated traffic is pushing sites to adopt blunt defenses - paywalls, identity checks, CAPTCHAs, and invasive tracking - simply to tell whether a request comes from a human. We can build a better solution that maintains strong privacy and provides a much less annoying experience for real humans using the web. This project requires collaboration across the ecosystem, and we're thrilled to work with Cloudflare and other like-minded partners to bring it to life." – Bobby Holley, CTO for Firefox at Mozilla.

PACT will further empower businesses to identify genuine visitors, ensuring they can focus their resources on the traffic that matters to them. PACT leverages trusted information from contexts that have authentic relationships with people while keeping that information private. This provides businesses with high-integrity assurances about their audiences with minimal friction. Using PACT on Cloudflare’s network raises the bar for trustworthiness and integrity online without the traditional costs.

About Cloudflare

Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET) is the leading connectivity cloud company. It empowers organizations to make their employees, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and cost. Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud delivers the most full-featured, unified platform of cloud-native products and developer tools, so any organization can gain the control they need to work, develop, and accelerate their business.

Powered by one of the world’s largest and most interconnected networks, Cloudflare blocks billions of threats online for its customers every day. It is trusted by millions of organizations – from the largest brands to entrepreneurs and small businesses to nonprofits, humanitarian groups, and governments across the globe.

Learn more about Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud at cloudflare.com/connectivity-cloud. Learn more about the latest Internet trends and insights at https://radar.cloudflare.com.

Cloudflare Acquires VoidZero to Build the Future of the AI-Native Web

• Acquisition brings Vite, the world’s leading JavaScript build tool, and its core open source team to Cloudflare
• Cloudflare commits $1 million to an independent Vite ecosystem fund to support open source maintainers and contributors

Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the leading connectivity cloud company, today announced it has acquired VoidZero, the open source-first company behind the next-generation JavaScript tooling ecosystem Vite. The acquisition will unify VoidZero’s high-performance tooling — including the Vite build tool, Vitest test runner, Rust-based Rolldown bundler and Oxc toolchain — natively into the Cloudflare ecosystem. By merging Cloudflare’s global edge network and Workers developer platform with the modern web's industry-standard toolchain, Cloudflare is creating a frictionless, one-click deployment stack from local code straight to Cloudflare’s global network.

Application development is undergoing a fundamental shift. The rise of autonomous AI coding agents has ushered in an era of rapid application scaffolding where speed and local-to-production predictability are paramount. VoidZero’s toolchain, anchored by Vite, has emerged as the shared substrate for the web ecosystem, capturing over 130 million weekly downloads. The Cloudflare Vite plugin has reached 13.9 million weekly downloads — equivalent to more than 10% of Vite’s entire weekly volume — proving that developers are already choosing this combined stack for AI-coded applications.

"The best engineers I know are shipping more code than ever, and writing less of it by hand. AI is doing more of the typing — so everything around it has to keep up,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. "Evan and his team built Vite from scratch with the same philosophy we used to build Cloudflare: strip out the bloat and make it fast. Bringing them on board gives millions of developers, and the AI agents working alongside them, the fastest path from local code to our global network.”

VoidZero’s team of open source creators and Rust optimization specialists, led by widely recognized Vue.js and Vite creator Evan You, will join Cloudflare’s Emerging Technology and Incubation (ETI) organization. The team will continue to advance VoidZero's open source roadmap while accelerating deep integration with the Cloudflare Workers developer platform.

"Our mission at VoidZero has always been to eliminate the fragmentation and performance bottlenecks of the modern web stack," said Evan You, founder and CEO of VoidZero. "Cloudflare shares our obsession with speed and architectural purity. Joining forces allows us to keep the Vite ecosystem neutral, open, and vendor-agnostic, while giving us the resources and global infrastructure to supercharge the developer experience for millions of engineers worldwide."

By integrating VoidZero’s hyper-performant, Rust-based tooling directly into Cloudflare’s Workers developer platform, Cloudflare will unify the entire software development lifecycle. Developers and autonomous AI agents alike will be able to move from an idea to global production instantly via a native, pluggable vite deploy ecosystem. Through this acquisition, Cloudflare plans to drive a project-centric development paradigm, focusing on three core initiatives:

• Unify the Developer Pipeline: Align the Cloudflare CLI natively with the seamless Vite workflow developers already love, bringing a frictionless end-to-end experience to every creator.
• Enable Intent-Based Infrastructure: Evolve toward a workflow where a single Vite deploy command handles everything. If application logic declares a need for a database or an object store, a Vite application with Cloudflare integration will automatically detect that intent and natively provision Cloudflare resources like D1 or R2 — with no manual dashboard intervention required.
• Maintain Open Source Steward Neutrality: Vite, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vitest will remain open source, vendor-agnostic and community-driven. Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ will remain strictly open source under MIT licenses. Cloudflare is committing $1 million to a new independent Vite ecosystem fund to support community maintainers and contributors who are independent of both VoidZero and Cloudflare.

"At Lovable, we are empowering developers to build and deploy full-stack applications at unprecedented scale. An open and predictable toolchain is absolutely critical to that mission. As agents handle increasingly complex, real-time tasks, they require an underlying architecture that is performant and modular,” said Fabian Hedin, CTO and co-founder of Loveable. “By building our automated pipeline on Vite and leveraging its open ecosystem, we’ve been able to radically accelerate how AI agents generate, compile, and ship code. We have worked closely with the Cloudflare and VoidZero teams, and we’re excited to continue supporting and benefiting from the ecosystem they’ve helped create. Open-source infrastructure like Vite plays a critical role in the future of software development, and we’re encouraged to see its development remain independent and transparent.”

About Cloudflare

Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET) is the leading connectivity cloud company. It empowers organizations to make their employees, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and cost. Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud delivers the most full-featured, unified platform of cloud-native products and developer tools, so any organization can gain the control they need to work, develop, and accelerate their business.

Powered by one of the world’s largest and most interconnected networks, Cloudflare blocks billions of threats online for its customers every day. It is trusted by millions of organizations – from the largest brands to entrepreneurs and small businesses to nonprofits, humanitarian groups, and governments across the globe.

Cloudflare Launches EmDash as WordPress Alternative with Built‑In Security and Payments

A new publishing platform called EmDash is positioning itself as the “spiritual successor to WordPress,” promising to retain the flexibility of plugins while eliminating the security risks that have long plagued the world’s most popular content management system.

Security concerns around WordPress plugins have grown in recent years, with reports of vulnerabilities affecting millions of sites. By addressing this pain point directly, EmDash aims to carve out a niche in a crowded market of CMS platforms, positioning itself as the next evolution in digital publishing.

WordPress powers over 40% of the Internet. It is a massive success that has enabled anyone to be a publisher, and created a global community of WordPress developers. But the WordPress open source project will be 24 years old this year. Hosting a website has changed dramatically during that time. When WordPress was born, AWS EC2 didn’t exist. In the intervening years, that task has gone from renting virtual private servers, to uploading a JavaScript bundle to a globally distributed network at virtually no cost. It’s time to upgrade the most popular CMS on the Internet to take advantage of this change.

EmDash is written entirely in TypeScript. It is serverless, but you can run it on your own hardware or any platform you choose. Plugins are securely sandboxed and can run in their own isolate, via Dynamic Workers, solving the fundamental security problem with the WordPress plugin architecture. And under the hood, EmDash is powered by Astro, the fastest web framework for content-driven websites.

EmDash is fully open source, MIT licensed, and available on GitHub. While EmDash aims to be compatible with WordPress functionality, no WordPress code was used to create EmDash. That allows us to license the open source project under the more permissive MIT license. We hope that allows more developers to adapt, extend, and participate in EmDash’s development.

EmDash is being pitched not just as another CMS, but as publishing infrastructure for the secure web. Its creators believe enterprises, media houses, and independent publishers will be drawn to a platform that combines scalability with peace of mind.

You can deploy the EmDash v0.1.0 preview to your own Cloudflare account, or to any Node.js server today as part of our early developer beta:

Or you can try out the admin interface here in the EmDash Playground:

What WordPress has accomplished

The story of WordPress is a triumph of open source that enabled publishing at a scale never before seen. Few projects have had the same recognisable impact on the generation raised on the Internet. The contributors to WordPress’s core, and its many thousands of plugin and theme developers have built a platform that democratised publishing for millions; many lives and livelihoods being transformed by this ubiquitous software.

There will always be a place for WordPress, but there is also a lot more space for the world of content publishing to grow. A decade ago, people picking up a keyboard universally learned to publish their blogs with WordPress. Today it’s just as likely that person picks up Astro, or another TypeScript framework to learn and build with. The ecosystem needs an option that empowers a wide audience, in the same way it needed WordPress 23 years ago.

EmDash is committed to building on what WordPress created: an open source publishing stack that anyone can install and use at little cost, while fixing the core problems that WordPress cannot solve.

Solving the WordPress plugin security crisis

WordPress’ plugin architecture is fundamentally insecure. 96% of security issues for WordPress sites originate in plugins. In 2025, more high severity vulnerabilities were found in the WordPress ecosystem than the previous two years combined.

Why, after over two decades, is WordPress plugin security so problematic?

A WordPress plugin is a PHP script that hooks directly into WordPress to add or modify functionality. There is no isolation: a WordPress plugin has direct access to the WordPress site’s database and filesystem. When you install a WordPress plugin, you are trusting it with access to nearly everything, and trusting it to handle every malicious input or edge case perfectly.

EmDash solves this. In EmDash, each plugin runs in its own isolated sandbox: a Dynamic Worker. Rather than giving direct access to underlying data, EmDash provides the plugin with capabilities via bindings, based on what the plugin explicitly declares that it needs in its manifest. This security model has a strict guarantee: an EmDash plugin can only perform the actions explicitly declared in its manifest. You can know and trust upfront, before installing a plugin, exactly what you are granting it permission to do, similar to going through an OAuth flow and granting a 3rd party app a specific set of scoped permissions.

For example, a plugin that sends an email after a content item gets saved looks like this: 

import { definePlugin } from "emdash";

export default () =>
definePlugin({
  id: "notify-on-publish",
  version: "1.0.0",
  capabilities: ["read:content", "email:send"],
  hooks: {
    "content:afterSave": async (event, ctx) => {
      if (event.collection !== "posts" || event.content.status !== "published") return;
      await ctx.email!.send({
        to: "editors@example.com",
        subject: `New post published: ${event.content.title}`,
        text: `"${event.content.title}" is now live.`,
      });
      ctx.log.info(`Notified editors about ${event.content.id}`);
    },
  },
});

This plugin explicitly requests two capabilities: content:afterSave to hook into the content lifecycle, and email:send to access the ctx.email function. It is impossible for the plugin to do anything other than use these capabilities.

Solving plugin security means solving marketplace lock-in

WordPress plugin security is such a real risk that WordPress.org manually reviews and approves each plugin in its marketplace. At the time of writing, that review queue is over 800 plugins long, and takes at least two weeks to traverse.

EmDash plugins have two important properties that mitigate this marketplace lock-in:

• Plugins can have any license: they run independently of EmDash and share no code.
• Plugin code runs independently in a secure sandbox: a plugin can be provided to an EmDash site, and trusted, without the EmDash site ever seeing the code.

Every EmDash site has x402 support built in — charge for access to content

x402 is an open, neutral standard for Internet-native payments. It lets anyone on the Internet easily charge, and any client pay on-demand, on a pay-per-use basis.

EmDash has built-in support for x402. This means anyone with an EmDash site can charge for access to their content without requiring subscriptions and with zero engineering work.

Solving scale-to-zero for WordPress hosting platforms

WordPress is not serverless: it requires provisioning and managing servers. EmDash is different: it’s built to run on serverless platforms, and make the most out of the v8 isolate architecture of Cloudflare’s open source runtime workerd.

EmDash is different: it’s built to run on serverless platforms, and make the most out of the v8 isolate architecture of Cloudflare’s open source runtime workerd. On an incoming request, the Workers runtime instantly spins up an isolate to execute code and serve a response. It scales back down to zero if there are no requests. And it only bills for CPU time (time spent doing actual work).

You can run EmDash anywhere, on any Node.js server — but on Cloudflare you can run millions of instances of EmDash using Cloudflare for Platforms that each instantly scale fully to zero or up to as many RPS as you need to handle, using the exact same network and runtime that the biggest websites in the world rely on.

Beyond cost optimizations and performance benefits, we’ve bet on this architecture at Cloudflare in part because we believe in having low cost and free tiers, and that everyone should be able to build websites that scale. We’re excited to help platforms extend the benefits of this architecture to their own customers, both big and small.

Modern frontend theming and architecture via Astro

EmDash is powered by Astro, the web framework for content-driven websites. To create an EmDash theme, you create an Astro project that includes:

• Pages: Astro routes for rendering content (homepage, blog posts, archives, etc.)
• Layouts: Shared HTML structure
• Components: Reusable UI elements (navigation, cards, footers)
• Styles: CSS or Tailwind configuration
• A seed file: JSON that tells the CMS what content types and fields to create

This makes creating themes familiar to frontend developers who are increasingly choosing Astro, and to LLMs which are already trained on ASTRO.

WordPress themes, though incredibly flexible, operate with a lot of the same security risks as plugins, and the more popular and commonplace your theme, the more of a target it is. Themes run through integrating with functions.php which is an all-encompassing execution environment, enabling your theme to be both incredibly powerful and potentially dangerous. EmDash themes, as with dynamic plugins, turns this expectation on its head. Your theme can never perform database operations.

An AI Native CMS — MCP, CLI, and Skills for EmDash

EmDash is designed to be managed programmatically by your AI agents. It provides the context and the tools that your agents need, including Agent Skills, EmDash CLI, and a built-in MCP Server.

Pluggable authentication, with Passkeys by default

The least fun part about working with any CMS is doing the rote migration of content: finding and replacing strings, migrating custom fields from one format to another, renaming, reordering and moving things around. This is either boring repetitive work or requires one-off scripts and “single-use” plugins and tools that are usually neither fun to write nor to use.

EmDash is designed to be managed programmatically by your AI agents. It provides the context and the tools that your agents need, including:

• Agent Skills: Each EmDash instance includes Agent Skills that describe to your agent the capabilities EmDash can provide to plugins, the hooks that can trigger plugins, guidance on how to structure a plugin, and even how to port legacy WordPress themes to EmDash natively. When you give an agent an EmDash codebase, EmDash provides everything the agent needs to be able to customize your site in the way you need.
• EmDash CLI: The EmDash CLI enables your agent to interact programmatically with your local or remote instance of EmDash. You can upload media, search for content, create and manage schemas, and do the same set of things you can do in the Admin UI.
• Built-in MCP Server: Every EmDash instance provides its own remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, allowing you to do the same set of things you can do in the Admin UI.

Pluggable authentication, with Passkeys by default

EmDash uses passkey-based authentication by default, meaning there are no passwords to leak and no brute-force vectors to defend against. User management includes familiar role-based access control out of the box: administrators, editors, authors, and contributors, each scoped strictly to the actions they need. Authentication is pluggable, so you can set EmDash up to work with your SSO provider, and automatically provision access based on IdP metadata.

Import your WordPress sites to EmDash

You can import an existing WordPress site by either going to WordPress admin and exporting a WXR file, or by installing the EmDash Exporter plugin on a WordPress site, which configures a secure endpoint that is only exposed to you, and protected by a WordPress Application Password you control. Migrating content takes just a few minutes, and automatically works to bring any attached media into EmDash’s media library.

Try it

EmDash is v0.1.0 preview, and we’d love you to try it, give feedback, and we welcome contributions to the EmDash GitHub repository.

If you’re just playing around and want to first understand what’s possible — try out the admin interface in the EmDash Playground.

To create a new EmDash site locally, via the CLI, run:

npm create emdash@latest Or you can do the same via the Cloudflare dashboard below:
We’re excited to see what you build, and if you're active in the WordPress community, as a hosting platform, a plugin or theme author, or otherwise — we’d love to hear from you. Email us at emdash@cloudflare.com, and tell us what you’d like to see from the EmDash project.

If you want to stay up to date with major EmDash developments, you can leave your email address here.

Cloudflare's connectivity cloud protects entire corporate networks, helps customers build Internet-scale applications efficiently, accelerates any website or Internet application, wards off DDoS attacks, keeps hackers at bay, and can help you on your journey to Zero Trust.

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.