The past few years have been marked by tremendous growth for CloudFlare. At the time of our last fundraising in December 2012, CloudFlare was a team of 37 operating a network in 23 cities and 15 countries—today we number over 200 with a presence in 62 cities and 33 countries. We’ve grown from delivering 85 billion page views per month for 500 thousand customers to nearly 1 trillion each month across 4 million Internet properties, all the while protecting our customers from hundreds of billions of cyber threats. The growth and resonance of our service since CloudFlare’s founding 5 years ago is beyond our wildest of expectations, but it is only in the coming years that our scale and efforts to build a better Internet will become visible.

In 2016 alone we will more than double our global presence, increase the size of our network by an order of magnitude, and with that allow millions of new businesses and online publishers to accelerate and secure their online applications and harness the growing power of the Internet economy. Our service is built on the simple premise that any individual or business should be able to quickly and easily ensure the global performance and availability of their websites and mobile apps, and withstand withering and sophisticated cyber attacks—all without a single piece of hardware, or the need to build a global network and the team of engineers to manage it all.

To sustain this level of growth requires investment. In this pursuit we’re pleased to announce that we have raised $110 million from Fidelity, Google, Microsoft, Baidu, Qualcomm and our existing investors. Beyond the additional capital raised, the broad, strategic participation in the round from many of the world’s leading technology firms validates the opportunity ahead of us, and positions us for the next chapter of our growth.

But before we write this new chapter, a bit about how we got here.

Seismic shifts are the sorts of groundbreaking developments that fundamentally alter the ways in which organizations and industries operate. We came upon a few such shifts as CloudFlare was founded in 2009. Although these shifts were already well underway, their strength has increased logarithmically each year.

These shifts are the massive movement of commerce and communication online, and the rapidly evolving means by which organizations deploy applications, increasingly in the cloud. Had one started a business in 2009, their first call might very well have been to Dell or HP to purchase servers (ours was to HP!), followed by calls to Oracle and Microsoft for the databases and software necessary to deliver the applications across the final tier of Internet hierarchy, the network edge. It is in this last tier that companies like Cisco capitalized on the last seismic shift at the network edge—the need to process and manage an explosion of network traffic directed towards the applications, and storage and compute platforms beneath.

Excerpt from our fundraising presentation titled "Scalability and elasticity of the cloud will prevail"

Today it is almost inconceivable that an upstart business would purchase a single piece of hardware, much less call anyone to procure it. In less time, with less cost, and more elasticity, an organization can turn up any number of storage and compute instances on cloud based platforms. The on-premise, perpetual license-based software and databases of yesteryear are now also available as services. Even complex applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource management (ERP) systems are now largely dominated by software as a service (SaaS) offerings. CloudFlare is now pioneering this same shift at the network edge. In other words, it’s time to say farewell to hardware appliances.

The network edge can be broadly described as the “control plane” for all traffic directed to the layers below. This control plane ensures that traffic to the layers below consistently reaches its destination, that authorized users receive appropriate access, and that hackers are kept at bay. Each of these appliances (e.g., firewalls, load balancers, DDoS mitigation appliances, WAN optimizers, malware scanners, authentication devices, among many others) look for patterns in traffic, apply stored rules against the patterns, and make network I/O decisions to block, re-route, and compress, among many other functions. Now, CloudFlare is able to perform each of these functions without a single piece of customer hardware, and across a global network with immensely greater scale and elasticity, and a small fraction of the latency and cost.

Excerpt from our fundraising presentation titled "The network edge now expands beyond the data center"

This shift at the network edge is further driven by its expansion, as well as the blurring of its perimeter (security jargon for the line delineating assets to be protected). This expansion is occurring across multiple vectors. Organizations now deploy their applications across multiple geographies to reduce latency, across disparate physical and cloud environments for redundancy and elasticity, and adopt third party SaaS applications to replace internal business systems. What used to be solved by hardware appliances is now far better solved by cloud services.

CloudFlare is the new control plane for the network edge. With a simple DNS change, traffic to an organization’s applications and store and compute environment are directed through CloudFlare’s global network no matter where they reside geographically, logically or virtually. With one of the largest edge networks globally, we can perform each of the aforementioned edge functions to accelerate, secure and ensure the availability of the applications behind us with blazing fast speed, absolute elasticity and an enormous return on investment compared to hardware based solutions.

This is our vision, and one that is now shared with many of the world’s leading technology firms (and investors). Each of Fidelity, Microsoft, Baidu, Qualcomm and Google are uniquely positioned to support CloudFlare’s evolution in a rapidly evolving environment, and address key questions. What is our mobile strategy? What is our China strategy? How are we going to succeed with large enterprises? Will other giants partner or compete with you? How does CloudFlare become a public company?

Our choice of investors should hopefully provide some insight into our answers to each of these questions. Moreover, each of the participants in our round agreed to invest in the company without any special control provisions, board representation, economic treatment or even information rights. It was important for us as a company to continue to execute against our vision without distraction.

We don’t precisely know, but if the past is any indicator, it may continue to be beyond our expectations. In a fun bit of CloudFlare history, we unearthed an e-mail between two of CloudFlare’s founders from May 2009.

What might have sounded delusional to many five years ago (and they probably would have been right at the time), is a reality today. Five years later, and built upon the contributions of a talented team, our steadfast customers, and an unparalleled group of investors, we are well on the path to building something big and unique.

We’re always looking for feedback. You asked for an intuitive, easy-to-use interface, and we delivered. Encryption and SSL certificates? Now free, and included with all plans. A larger network to serve your global visitor base? We’re 62 deep, and not stopping. This feedback has helped tremendously over the past 5 years, so please keep it coming as we tackle the next five.

We’re looking for new team members. Great people who are passionate about building a better Internet, and willing to tackle big problems. We are building a service that allows anyone to run a website or mobile app as fast and secure as the Internet giants, improving the surfing experience for over 2 billion Internet users, and empowering millions of businesses to securely transact online each day. If that sounds interesting, check out our job postings here.

Thanks for your support over the past five years.

—The CloudFlare team

It's been an exciting day here at CloudFlare. We are happy to finally introduce our newest investors, Union Square Ventures. This blog post was written by Brad Burnham, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, and previously appeared on the USV blog.

Joi Ito likes to say the Internet is a belief system. At Union Square Ventures, we believe in the Internet. We spend a lot of time thinking about how the Internet enables young companies to radically transform markets. We try to understand what it is about ubiquitous connectivity and permissionless innovation that leads to the emergent innovation we have all come to expect on the Internet. We have not, until recently, spent much time thinking about the Internet itself.

Now, as more and more of our portfolio companies struggle to scale their services securely or fend off DDoS or malware attacks, we find ourselves thinking that the openness of the Internet - the characteristic that leads to so much innovation - is also a weakness. The question we grappled with is how can we preserve what is best about the Internet but recognize that there are bad actors out there that all of our portfolio companies should be aware of and protect themselves against.

Just about the time we began grappling with this question I met Michelle Zatlyn, one of the co-founders of CloudFlare. We were both serving on the FCC’s Open Internet Advisory Committee. I was the only venture capitalist on the committee and Michelle was the only entrepreneur. We found ourselves working together to defend the freedom to innovate on the Internet in a room full of telecom and cable network operators, who were more concerned about the freedom to operate in a way that minimized their costs, maximized their revenue and ensured their strategic control over their networks. I came to appreciate her values long before I fully understood her business.

Our first glimpse of the importance of CloudFlare came from Chris Poole, the founder of our portfolio company, Canvas, and before that 4Chan. He found CloudFlare at a moment of desperation. 4Chan was knocked offline by a denial of service attack and he was scrambling to find a solution. I am not sure how Chris learned about CloudFlare but I remember clearly, how big a difference it made in his life. Once he switched his DNS servers to put 4Chan behind the CloudFlare network, the DDoS attack was immediately mitigated. He also found that his site’s performance improved, but most importantly, it gave him the confidence that his site could be reliable, fast and secure, without a huge investment in his own internal site reliability team, something he could not afford.

Now CloudFlare was on our radar. We started spending more time with Michelle and her co-founder Matthew Prince. We started to learn just how interesting and important CloudFlare was. Matthew likes to explain CloudFlare by referencing the typical network implementation of a large institution like a bank or an Internet service. At scale these networks invest in equipment to improve 1) performance, 2) load balancing, 3) WAN Optimization, 4) secure the perimeter (firewalls), 5) fend off DDoS attacks and malware. This equipment defines the edge of any large network. CloudFlares contribution was to realize that all of this could be abstracted into the cloud as a service, and that by offering this set of services CloudFlare could open up the market to the millions of smaller sites who could never dream of deploying and managing this kind of infrastructure themselves.

Once we understood that CloudFlare was democratizing access to these essential services in a way that preserves open emergent innovation on the Internet, we knew we should do everything we could to get Matthew and Michelle to accept an investment from us. We are thrilled today to be able to publicly announce that we led CloudFlares most recent round. We look forward to working with a great investor syndicate, a great team, and the million and a half sites already on the CloudFlare network to make these essential network services available to innovators large and small worldwide.