Cloudflare, Inc.

Cloudflare operates one of the world's largest networks, providing content delivery, DDoS protection, zero-trust security, serverless computing, and developer platform services. Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn founded it in 2009 in San Francisco. The mission is to help build a better Internet by making it faster, safer, and more reliable.

The network spans over 310 cities in more than 120 countries. Servers sit within 50 milliseconds of 95% of the Internet-connected population. That massive distributed network underpins everything Cloudflare sells. When organizations route traffic through Cloudflare, the network acts as a reverse proxy that accelerates content, absorbs DDoS attacks, enforces security policies, and optimizes performance in a single pass at the edge.

Products cover a lot of ground. Application services include CDN, DDoS protection, web application firewall, bot management, API protection, and DNS. Zero Trust services deliver SASE, browser isolation, CASB, DLP, email security, and zero-trust network access, competing directly with Zscaler and Palo Alto Networks. Network services include Magic Transit for network-layer DDoS protection and Magic WAN for software-defined WAN.

The Developer Platform is increasingly important. Workers provides serverless compute. R2 offers object storage with zero egress fees. D1 is serverless SQL. Pages handles JAMstack deployment. Workers AI lets developers run AI inference at the edge, close to users. This has created a growing developer ecosystem for building applications at the network edge.

Cloudflare serves a wide range of customers. Millions of free-tier users create a powerful acquisition funnel for paid conversions. The enterprise sales team drives higher contract values and multi-product adoption among larger customers.

Annual revenue is roughly $1.8 billion with gross margins around 78%. Revenue is subscription-based. Net revenue retention exceeds 115%. Operating margins are approaching profitability at scale.

The competitive advantage comes from the breadth and density of the network, the ability to ship products rapidly (hundreds launched since inception), and an increasingly integrated platform that consolidates CDN, security, and compute into one edge architecture. With about 4,000 employees, Cloudflare is building the infrastructure layer for the next generation of the Internet.