From our earliest days, Cloudflare has stood for helping build a better Internet that’s accessible to all. It’s core to our mission that anyone who wants to start building on the Internet should be able to do so easily, and without the barriers of prohibitively expensive or difficult to use infrastructure.

Nowhere is this philosophy more important – and more impactful to the Internet – than with our developer platform, Cloudflare Workers. Workers is, quite simply, where developers and entrepreneurs start on Day 1. It’s a full developer platform that includes cloud storage; website hosting; SQL databases; and of course, the industry’s leading serverless product. The platform’s ease-of-use and accessible pricing (all the way down to free) are critical in advancing our mission. For startups, this translates into fast, easy deployment and iteration, that scales seamlessly with predictable, transparent and cost-effective pricing. Building a great business from scratch is hard enough – we ought to know! – and so we’re aiming to take all the complexity out of your application infrastructure.

Today, we’re taking things a step further and making it easier for startups to build the business of their dreams. We’re announcing a $1.25 billion Workers Launchpad funding program in partnership with some of the world’s leading venture capital firms. Any startup built on Workers can apply. As is the case with the Workers Platform itself, we’ve tried to make applying dead simple: it should take you less than five minutes to submit your application through the Workers Launchpad portal.

How does it work? The only requirement for being eligible for the funding program is that you’ve built your core infrastructure on Workers. If you’re new to Cloudflare and Cloudflare Workers, check out our Startup Plan to get started. We hope these resources will be helpful to all startups and help level the playing field, no matter where in the world you might be.

Once you submit your application, it will be reviewed by our Launchpad team, several of whom are former entrepreneurs and venture capital folks themselves. They’ll match promising applicants with our VC partners who have the most expertise in your space (more on them below). Every quarter, we’ll announce the winners of our Launchpad program. Winners, our “Workers Founders”, will be guaranteed the opportunity to pitch the VC partner(s) that we’ve determined would be a good match for your business. It’s a win-win all around. VCs get the opportunity to invest in businesses they know are being built on a forward-looking, world-class, development platform. Entrepreneurs get connected to world-class VCs. And for the first class of winners, we’ll have a few added perks that we describe in more detail below.

When we approached our friends in the venture community with our vision for the Workers Launchpad, we received incredibly positive feedback and excitement. Many have seen firsthand the competitive advantages of building on Workers through their own portfolio companies. Moreover, Cloudflare is home to one of the largest developer communities on Earth with approximately 20% of the world’s websites on our network. As such, we can play a unique role in matching great entrepreneurs with great VCs to further not only the Workers platform, but also the Internet ecosystem, for everyone.

We’re honored to announce a world-class group of VC Launch Partners supporting this program and the ecosystem of Workers-based startups:

So why are we doing this? The simple answer is we’re proud of our Workers Developer Platform and think that everyone should be using it. Entrepreneurs who develop on Workers can ship faster; more easily and cost-effectively; and in a way that future proofs your infrastructure:

Speed. Development velocity isn’t just a convenience for an entrepreneur. It’s a massive competitive advantage. In fact, development velocity is one of Cloudflare’s competitive advantages – we’re able to develop quickly because we build on Workers. When you develop on Workers, you don’t need to spend time configuring DNS records, maintaining certificates, scaling up clusters, or building complex deployment pipelines. Focus on developing your application, and Cloudflare will handle the rest.

Ease of use. Startup teams and founders are some of the busiest people on earth. You shouldn’t have to think about – or make complicated decisions about – IT infrastructure. Questions like: “Which availability zone should I choose?”, or “Will I be able to scale up my infrastructure in time for our next viral marketing campaign?” shouldn’t have to cross your mind! And on the Workers Platform, they don’t. The code you and your team writes automatically deploys quickly and consistently across Cloudflare’s global network in 275+ cities in over 100 countries. Cloudflare securely and scalably connects your users to your applications, regardless of where those applications are hosted or how many users suddenly sign up for your product. Developers can easily manage globally distributed applications with a programmable network that easily connects to whatever services they need to talk to.

Future-proofing your infrastructure and your wallet. Cloudflare’s massive global network – that’s distributed across 275+ cities in over 100 countries – is able to scale with your business, no matter how large it grows to become. We also help you remain compliant with local laws and regulations as you expand around the world, with capabilities like Workers’ Jurisdictional Restrictions for Durable Objects. You can sleep soundly at night instead of worrying about how to level up your infrastructure in the midst of shifting regulations, and equally importantly, knowing that you will not wake up to any surprise bills. Many of us have had the experience of being charged unexpected and / or exorbitant fees from our cloud providers. For example, providers will often make it easy and free to onboard your application or data, but charge exorbitant rates when you want to move them out (i.e. egress fees). Cloudflare will never charge for egress. Our pricing is simple, and we constantly aim to be the low-cost provider, no matter how large your business grows to be.

We’re excited about Workers not only because we’ve built our own infrastructure on it, but also because we’re seeing the incredible things others have built on it. In fact, we acquired a company built entirely on Workers at the end of last year, an Israeli start-up named Zaraz, which secures and accelerates third party web tools. Workers allowed Zaraz to replace the multiple network requests of each tool running on a website with one single request, effectively streamlining a messy web of extensions into a single lightweight application. This acquisition opened our eyes to the power of the global community that’s built on our platform, and left us motivated to help startups built on Workers find the funding, mentorship, and support needed to grow.

To make it even easier for startups to take advantage of all the benefits that Workers has to offer, applicants to the Workers Launchpad program who have raised less than $3 million in total external funding will automatically have the option to receive Cloudflare’s Startup Plan. This plan includes all the elements of Cloudflare’s Pro and Business Plans ($2,400 annual value) plus higher tiers of our Stream video product, our Teams Zero Trust security suite and the Workers platform. To make sure the full range of our developer platform is accessible to startups, we recently more than tripled the number of products available in this plan, which now includes email security, R2, Pages, KV, and many others.

Furthermore, all startups that apply by October 31, 2022, will be eligible to be selected for the Winter 2022 class of Workers Founders, which will unlock additional support, mentorship, and marketing opportunities. Being selected as a Workers Founder will get you a chance to practice your pitch with investors, engage with leaders from Cloudflare, and get advice on how to build a successful business from topics like recruiting to marketing, sales, and beyond during a virtual Workers Founders Bootcamp Week. The program will culminate in a virtual Demo Day, so you can show the world what you’ve been building. We’re leaning in to help promising entrepreneurs join us in our mission to help build a better Internet.

Accessibility and ease of use are core to everything we do at Cloudflare. We will always make our products and platforms so easy to use that even the smallest business or hobbyist can easily use them. We hope the Workers Launchpad funding program encourages entrepreneurs from all around the world, and from all backgrounds, to start building on Workers, and makes it easier for you to find the funding you need to build the business of your dreams.

Head to the Workers Launchpad page to apply and join the Cloudflare Developer Discord to engage with the Workers community. If you’re a VC that is interested in supporting the program, reach out to Workers-Launchpad@cloudflare.com.

Cloudflare is not providing any funding or making any funding decisions, and there is no guarantee that any particular company will receive funding through the program. All funding decisions will be made by the venture capital firms that participate in the program. Cloudflare is not a registered broker-dealer, investment adviser, or other similar intermediary.

It’s well known that global companies can face challenges doing business in and out of China due to the country’s unique rules, regulations, and norms, not to mention recent political and trade complications. Less well known is that China’s logistical and technical network infrastructure is also quite different from the rest of the world’s. With global Internet traffic up 30% over the past month due to the pandemic, these logistical and technical hurdles are increasing the burden for global businesses at exactly the wrong time. It’s now not unusual for someone based in China to have to wait extended periods and often be unable to access applications hosted elsewhere, or vice-versa, due to the lower performance of international Internet traffic to and from China. This affects global companies with customers, suppliers or employees in China, and Chinese companies who are trying to reach global users.

Our mission is to help build a better Internet, for everyone, everywhere. So, today we’re excited to announce a significant strategic partnership with JD Cloud & AI, the cloud and intelligent technology business unit of Chinese Internet giant JD.com. Through this partnership, we’ll be adding 150 data centers in mainland China, an increase in the region of over 700%. The partnership will also enable JD to provide a Cloudflare-powered service to China-based customers. As a result, it will create a one-stop solution for companies both inside and outside of China to go truly global.

Cloudflare has helped our global customers deliver a secure, fast, and reliable Internet experience for China-based visitors since 2015 and we’ve served Chinese customers since our inception. Cloudflare customers currently are able to extend their configurations with the click of a button across data centers in 17 cities in mainland China. As a result, they’re able to deliver their content faster, more securely, and reliably in-country. The demand for the service has been overwhelming, and we’ve been exploring ways to provide our customers with a network that would have an order of magnitude greater coverage.

What we’ve learned from our experience is that having a widely distributed network and world class partners in China matters more there than almost anywhere else in the world. To understand why, it’s important to understand the specific technical and logistical hurdles that exist there.

China has a non-uniform technical and network infrastructure, directly impacting Internet performance. Mainland China has three major telecom carriers—China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile—serving 22 provinces, 4 municipalities, and 5 autonomous regions. In many of these places, each carrier operates a distinct network and in some provinces more than one network, that in many cases, operate independently of one another. The result is many different sub-networks that need to be coordinated.

Regulatory hurdles in the network space can also present challenges. Unlike the rest of the world, where Anycast routing is generally available, in China the three main ISPs control IP address allocation and routing for customers’ networks both inside the country and globally. Small or large companies rarely own their own IP address allocations, and even fewer use BGP to control Internet routing. Because of the lack of BGP and the static allocation of IPs, the carriers’ customers operate on IP addresses that are homed onto a single network’s backbone.

The combination of this single-homed IP connectivity and the fragmented network topography leads to frequent bottlenecks between the various domestic ISPs. This makes network coverage all the more important. Add in a rapidly expanding economy with growing Internet activity, and extraordinary times such as these which puts even more strain on the Internet, and it's easy to see why situations regularly occur where too much traffic is paired with too little capacity.

Compounding these hurdles further is that, from a business and logistics perspective, China is similarly a collection of sub-markets. There are huge variations between provinces in terms of population levels, average income, consumer spending, and the like. Regional business regulations also vary dramatically_._ Although it is slowly opening up to outside competition, the Chinese transportation and logistics market is one of the most highly regulated in the world. Regulation exists at a number of different tiers, imposed by national, regional, and local authorities. Finally, there are shortages of high-quality logistics facilities and warehousing spaces, making it hard to find domestic providers for managing import, export, and local transportation as well as trade compliance. You often have to hire consultants who specialize in the China market to assess quality, trustworthiness, and other factors.

This makes it challenging both for foreign companies seeking a fast, secure, and reliable Internet experience but also, as we often hear from our customers, to navigate China more generally.

Given these technical, logistical, and regulatory complexities, it’s very difficult for foreign companies to navigate the China landscape without local expertise. Partnering with JD Cloud & AI provides not only local expertise, but also a relationship with one of the world’s largest logistics, e-commerce, and Internet companies, JD.com.

JD.com is a juggernaut, operating at a scale that’s rare among global companies. It’s China’s largest retailer by revenue, online or offline, with one billion retail customers, a quarter billion registered users, seven million enterprise customers, and $83 billion in 2019 revenue. Its highly automated logistics system uses robots, AI, and fleets of drones to cover 99% of China’s population.

JD decided several years ago to open its technology platform to its enterprise customers and began offering cloud services through a new business unit called JD Cloud & AI. JD Cloud & AI has quickly become the fastest growing cloud company among the top five Chinese providers. It offers a full range of services across eight availability zones in China and has made security and compliance a key part of its offering. In line with its parent company, JD Cloud & AI has made serving a global audience a key part of its strategy and has partnered with the likes of Microsoft and Citrix to build on this strategy. Importantly, like Cloudflare, the company has continued to invest in its infrastructure through the current pandemic, and has been critical to keeping China’s supply chains flowing and its businesses functioning.

Our partnership with JD Cloud & AI will allow international businesses to grow their online presence in China without having to worry about managing separate tools with separate vendors for security and performance in China. Customers will benefit from greater performance and security inside China using the same configurations that they use with Cloudflare everywhere else in the world.

Using Cloudflare's international network outside of China, and JD Cloud & AI’s network inside of China, any enterprise can rapidly and securely deploy cloud-based firewall, WAN optimization, distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, content delivery, DNS services, and Cloudflare Workers, our serverless computing solution, worldwide. All with the click of a button within Cloudflare’s dashboard and without deploying a single piece of hardware.

For those customers who need it, we also expect JD.com to be able to help with in-country logistics. JD operates over 700 warehouses that cover almost all the counties and districts in China. It has over 360 million active individual consumers and seven million enterprise customers that purchase products on its platform. For Cloudflare customers interested in reaching these Chinese end-customers, no matter where they are located in China, JD.com will be able to help.

The partnership with JD Cloud & AI will also allow us to help Chinese companies reach global audiences. JD Cloud & AI will use Cloudflare's international network outside of China, and the JD Cloud & AI network inside of China, to allow any China-based enterprise to use Cloudflare’s integrated performance and security services worldwide, all seamlessly controlled from within the JD Cloud & AI dashboard.

As always, we’re taking care to be thoughtful about the treatment of customer data with this partnership. Cloudflare operates all services outside of China, and JD Cloud & AI all services inside of China. No Cloudflare customer traffic passes through the China network unless a customer explicitly opts-in to the service. And, for Cloudflare customers that opt-in to proxying content inside China, traffic and log data from outside of China is not stored in the China network or shared with our partner.

We are excited about this new partnership which will help us continue to offer customers the best performance and security service available anywhere in the world — and as a one-stop solution. While we can’t control the trade and political climate, which will inevitably ebb and flow over time, we can help our customers with technical and logistical challenges they may face doing business around the world, especially in these challenging times.

New and existing Cloudflare customers can request to be served in China by filling out an information request at https://www.cloudflare.com/china.