Wheelings & Dealings: CloudFlare Grabs $110M Funding Round and Makes Key Cloud Partnerships

By Laura Stotler, TMCnet Contributing Editor  |  September 23, 2015

CloudFlare has been firing up its networking and development efforts over the past week and the endeavor has paid off. The content-delivery network (CDN) and security specialist announced a $110 million round of funding, on the heels of a massive partnership announcement with Chinese search engine company Baidu.

The funding is coming from a very targeted group of cloud players, mainly Google Capital, Microsoft (News - Alert), Baidu and Qualcomm. And in addition to partnering with Baidu on the technology front, CloudFlare has announced a deeper partnership with Google Cloud Platform on the infrastructure side of things. The company is also working with Qualcomm (News - Alert) on optimizing connections between its own network and phones and Qualcomm chips, as well as looking at servers with ARM-based chips from Qualcomm for compatibility.

According to a blog post by Joshua Motta, special projects lead at CloudFlare, the company will use the investment round to meet its ambitious growth goals for 2016. CloudFlare is planning to double its global presence and increase its network size. Perhaps more importantly though, the company is forging strategic partnerships with cloud players to set itself up for its next chapter of aggressive growth.

“Fidelity, Microsoft, Baidu, Qualcomm and Google (News - Alert) are uniquely positioned to support CloudFlare’s evolution in a rapidly evolving environment, and address key questions,” wrote Motta.

CloudFlare currently boasts four million customers for its services, which include DoS mitigation and web application firewalls. The company anticipates reaching a $100 million revenue run by the end of the year and an IPO could be in the works by 2017. In the meantime, CloudFlare is focusing on growth and partnerships, and will continue to deliver premium firewall functionality in service form by offering a control plane at the network edge that supports multiple cloud environments and configurations.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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