Cloudflare wants to support the startups that use its software by introducing them to dozens of investors that have collectively offered to invest up to $1.25 billion in venture capital.
The company went public almost three years back. Cloudflare develops a serverless computing platform called Cloudflare Workers, among other products. The organization recently announced that it wants to connect startups using Cloudflare Workers to investors. Dozens of venture firms have collectively offered to invest up to $1.25 billion.
It’s a splashy and smart incentive to motivate more startups to become a part of its five-year-old product. According to Cloudflare, the product helps developers augment and build applications without interfering with infrastructure or configurations. In a recent press release, the company stated that startups can scale quickly using the platform.
Cloudflare competes
This funding program allows Cloudflare to compete with lucrative platforms and products such as Azure, Google Cloud and AWS, which offer serverless computing as well. “I wouldn’t characterize it as ‘stealing’ market share from anyone”, commented Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare. “It’s a matter of earning market share, and the way you earn market share is by providing a better product at a more affordable price.”
Prince added that “it’s significantly less expensive than the legacy public clouds” because of how it’s built. The CEO explained that modern browsers “encounter new, untrusted code with nearly every page they open online today. They need a way to quickly and safely execute that code and use a technology called ‘isolates’ to achieve that.”
It surely resonates with developers. Cloudflare stocks have skyrocketed along with other tech shares. 20 percent of Cloudflare’s contracted customers use Cloudflare Workers, which aims for a user base of 1 million developers by the end of 2022.
Funding program
The new funding program is the result of several venture capitalists discovering that multiple companies in their portfolios were using Cloudflare Workers. Among the venture firms that agreed to pitch in are Amplify Partners, Altimeter Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Decibel, Cowboy Ventures, Emergence Capital and Greylock Partners.
At the moment, Cloudflare isn’t providing any funding itself, nor is it participating in the decision-making process of investors. All decisions are in the hands of the participating companies. Startups that apply for the funding program will have access to a number of other initiatives designed to accelerate startup growth.
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