CloudFlare, a San Francisco-based company that helps businesses protect their websites from security threats and boost their load times, got its start at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2010, where it was a runner-up to Qwiki in the Startup Battlefield. Today, two years later, CloudFlare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince took the stage again at Disrupt to give the crowd a status update.
Prince said that at Disrupt 2010, the judges had been concerned about whether or not the startup would be able to scale effectively — something that can be hard to demonstrate in a demo at a startup pitch competition. In spite of the early skepticism, CloudFlare has been able to hit scale pretty quickly. Prince said that CloudFlare is today providing security and speedy rendering for half a trillion pageviews — not an insignificant number.
To date, the company has raised $22 million in outside funding from New Enterprise Associates, Venrock and Pelion Venture Partners. They’ve also assisted the U.S. government formulate its Internet policy and has grown its base of websites to 500K+. Collectively, the startup now sees 70B pageviews per month and 600M uniques — more traffic per month than Instagram, eBay, Amazon, Aol, Apple and many more, combined.
And last we heard, this growth was all organic — good ole word of mouth. CloudFlare didn’t have a dedicated sales force. I mean it seems like BS marketing, but it really doesn’t get better than this, and it’s nice to see a company growing based on the fact that it actually solves a real problem.
Prince told Fred back in June that a number of escort services in Turkey had been the victims of cyberattack, so one switched to CloudFlare to help protect from those attacks. By Fathers Day, “virtually the whole industry switched to using the company’s systems.”
Mike Arrington may have called CloudFlare unsexy when it demoed at TC Disrupt — “like a muffler for the Internet” — but that kind of security and speedy rendering is pretty hot.
Updating
CloudFlare is a service that does one thing: make websites better. With a single change to DNS, sites are instantly protected from a wide range of online threats, see an increase in page load speeds, and have their content dynamically optimized across the Internet. CloudFlare’s core service is free.
Matthew is the co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, Inc. Matthew wrote his first computer program when he was 7, and hasn’t been able to shake the bug since. After attending the University of Chicago Law School, he worked as an attorney for one day before jumping at the opportunity to be a founding member of a tech startup. He hasn’t looked back. CloudFlare is Matthew’s third entrepreneurial venture. Matthew holds a degree in English and Computer Science from Trinity College....
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