Cloudflare

Cloudflare sits between website visitors and a customer's hosting provider as a reverse proxy, providing content delivery, DDoS mitigation, web application security, DNS, Zero Trust access, domain registration and the Workers edge computing platform. It was founded on July 26, 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway and Michelle Zatlyn, and Prince and Holloway had previously built Project Honey Pot. The company is headquartered in San Francisco. Its 2019 prospectus described a network in 194 cities in more than 90 countries and more than 20 million internet properties on its platform, many on its free plan.

Cloudflare's first Form D, filed in November 2009, records $2.05 million sold, with Ray Rothrock of Venrock and Carl Ledbetter of Pelion Ventures (then UV Partners) joining the board; that matches the $2.05 million Series A liquidation preference in the prospectus. Later preferred rounds were a Series B of about $20 million and a Series C of $50 million, followed by a Series D whose first tranche carried about $109 million of preference. In September 2018 Cloudflare sold a further $150 million of Series D, of which Fidelity bought $60 million, Pelion $32.5 million and NEA $30.4 million. Total preferred liquidation preference reached $332.0 million. Before the IPO, NEA held 23.0% of Class B shares, Pelion 20.9% and Venrock 19.5%, and Fidelity held 30.9% of Class A. Union Square Ventures was an existing stockholder and agreed to sell shares to Pelion at the IPO price.

Cloudflare priced its IPO at $15.00 per share and began trading on September 13, 2019 under the ticker NET, raising about $491.1 million in net proceeds. Revenue grew from $192.7 million in 2018 to $2.168 billion in 2025, and first-quarter 2026 revenue was a record $639.8 million, up 34% year over year. In May 2026 it cut about 1,100 roles, roughly 20% of staff, citing AI adoption. It has continued to acquire companies, including Area 1 Security in 2022, Replicate in 2025, and Human Native, Astro and VoidZero in 2026.

Cloudflare took ten years from founding to IPO, financed with about $332 million of preferred equity, a modest sum next to its later scale. Its early backers, Venrock and Pelion at the $2.05 million Series A, plus NEA, entered at the earliest stages and still held about 60% of the Class B stock combined at listing. Fidelity's late-stage Series D money is a typical crossover position taken shortly before the IPO.