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.

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 perform 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.