serverless computing platform

Cloudflare, a renowned firm for providing security, performance, and reliability services helping to develop a better internet has declared a new funding program for startups on 28th September 2022 in partnership with leading venture capital investors.

The Workers Launchpad Funding Program will offer up to 1.25 billion USD of financing to various startups developing applications on Cloudflare Workers which is a highly scalable serverless computing platform that enables and assists developers to create or augment apps without maintaining or configuring the costly infrastructure.

“If there is one thing venture capitalists look for in the companies they fund, it is 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 chief executive officer 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”

Source: ciosea.economictimes.indiatimes.com

Cloudflare claims, startups can scale so fast by using a platform that it acquired last year known as Zaraz which promises to speed up website performance with a single line of code, in a related press release.

This funding program is undoubtedly about Cloudflare aiming for hugely lucrative products such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure as far as we can tell. When the Cloudflare Chief Executive Officer, Prince Matthew, was asked why Cloudflare thinks it can steal market share from these much larger firms.

“I wouldn’t characterize it as ‘stealing’ market share from anyone,” he said. “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.”Asked how much more affordable, he said merely that it’s “significantly less expensive than the legacy public clouds” because of how it’s built. As Prince explains it, 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.” Cloudflare Workers, which is the name of the platform, “takes the isolates technology inspired by the browser and makes it available as a developer platform.”

Source: techcrunch.com

Cloudflare is in partnership with twenty-six leading venture capital enterprises such as Altimeter Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Amplify Partners, Altos Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Decibel, IVP, Cowboy Ventures, FirstMarks, Meritech, Lightspeed, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Root Ventures, Emergence Capital, Pear, Scale Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Silverton Partners, Signal Peak, StepStone Group, Threshold Ventures, Venrock, U.S. Venture Partners, Venrock and Vertex Ventures US to assist developers through Cloudflare Workers to develop their applications.

Any private firm worldwide which is building on Cloudflare Workers is qualified for applying to the program. Companies will receive a cash investment from these partner firms if they get selected by these participating firms. They will also receive mentorship and assistance from Cloudflare.

As of now, thousands of developers all over the world rely on Cloudflare Workers to build and deploy applications without maintaining or configuring the expensive infrastructure.

The developers can deploy code close to their users, maintaining the speed, performance, and scale of Cloudflare to their customers with its network spanning more than 275 cities across 100 countries around the world. More than 5,00,000 developers have developed on Cloudflare’s developer platform and launched more than three million applications since 2017.