Cloudflare was founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn in San Francisco. The company started as a web application firewall and CDN (content delivery network) but has grown into a broad internet infrastructure platform.
Cloudflare’s network spans over 300 cities across 100+ countries, positioning servers within milliseconds of virtually every internet user on earth. The company claims to handle over 20% of all internet traffic. When major DDoS attacks happen, Cloudflare is often the company mitigating them — the network has absorbed attacks exceeding 70 million requests per second.
The company went public on the NYSE in 2019. Its product suite now includes CDN, DDoS protection, WAF, DNS, SSL/TLS, load balancing, Zero Trust security (Cloudflare Access, Gateway, WARP VPN), Workers (serverless computing at the edge), R2 (S3-compatible object storage with zero egress fees), Pages (static site hosting), and D1 (serverless SQL database).
Cloudflare Workers is particularly notable. It lets developers run code at the network edge in over 300 locations, with cold start times under 5 milliseconds. This platform has attracted developers building latency-sensitive applications and has spawned an ecosystem of edge-native tools.
Annual revenue exceeded $1.6 billion in 2023, growing at around 30% year-over-year. Cloudflare serves over 100,000 paying customers and millions of free-tier users. The free tier, which provides basic CDN and DDoS protection, is widely used and serves as a powerful acquisition funnel.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Cloudflare employs over 3,800 people. The company is led by co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince.
