When Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion earlier this month, quite a few pundits were left wondering if Facebook hadn’t overpaid for the photo-sharing service. Another company that is currently rumored to be raising funding at a $1 billion valuation is CloudFlare. The service, which promises to protect websites from security threats and helps speed up loading times in the process, launched a little riff on the rumors around its valuation today – and is making some fun of Instagram in the process – by launching Instaflare. With Instaflare, website owners on the CloudFlare network can apply five Instagram-like filters to the images on their sites with just one click and make their photos look “like a billion bucks.” → Read More
CloudFlare, a San Francisco-based startup that protects web sites from security threats and speeds up their load times, has been in talks to raise funding at a valuation that’s around $1 billion, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.
Apparently on the back of the company’s growth, there was inbound interest during the last three to four months with at least one firm agreeing to north of a $1 billion valuation. A few other venture firms have given pushback, saying that a $1 billion post-money valuation is too high.
The company itself says it has no need to raise funding, with the majority of its last $20 million round still in the bank. (And no, they didn’t plant this story because I heard about it through other backchannel chatter about Sand Hill deal flow.)
“Cloudflare’s team is working to address some of the Internet’s hardest challenges. We’re literally building a faster, safer, smarter web,” the company’s chief executive Matthew Prince told me. “We’re in a fortunate position where we don’t need to raise capital and have no immediate plans to do so.” → Read More
Geeklist must never have learned the first rule of holes: When you’re in one, stop digging. I was all the way on the other side of the world at a conference held at a random amusement park in the German countryside and it seemed the Geeklist boys almost dug their way to me. The incident, which appears to have reignited the women in tech debate, I first got wind of from an Australian who was attending the conference. “Silicon valley hasn’t changed since I left there years ago,” he said over a beer. “Still a bunch of frat boys running the show.”
Later, over Skype, I asked Michelle Zatlyn, one of my two co-founders at CloudFlare, what she thought of the whole thing. “What happened at Geekwire?” she wrote back, having missed the meme. I gave her the gory details and said I was surprised she hadn’t heard. “Sorry,” she replied, “busy building a company .”
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Whatever position you may take on SOPA, or on whether or not sites should black out against SOPA (Yes it has come to this), the issue has reached a boiling point today with sites like Wikipedia and Reddit pledging to blackout on Wednesday in order to further awareness of the measure’s pitfalls.
Because SOPA and PIPA threaten the existence of sites that link to copyright infringing content (like Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook and every other site on the Internet) the bills — which are currently stalled in Congress — have sparked a massive online backlash.
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The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App (Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline, the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0), the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.
In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can. → Read More
With over 20% of Internet users (approximately 350 million uniques a month) and 20 billion page views per month passing through his network since its launch at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September, Matthew Prince – CEO of website protection service CloudFlare – might know a thing or two about the Internet. → Read More
Put one big, fat candle on the cake. One year ago today, a startup named CloudFlare launched on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, where the startup placed second to Qwiki. (You can read our initial coverage here.) For those unfamiliar with CloudFlare, the startup offers a free service designed to not only boost the speed of your company’s website but also protect it from those nefarious web-born threats that hamper load times and just generally make IT guys grumble. Not a sexy product, but one that’s necessary and integral to the success of web businesses.
To give a quick snapshot of how appealing this service is to eBusinesses: 365 days after launch, CloudFlare is now powering over 100,000 websites, with more than 5 percent of those seeing over 1.5 million monthly page views. From zero traffic to today powering a host of websites that see a collective 15 billion page views per month and more than 350 million unique visitors, CloudFlare apparently has a fairly significant silver lining. → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt finalist CloudFlare is teaming up with realtime website translation service Smartling to allow users to translate their websites into any language. As you may know, CloudFlare offers a service that protects websites from online threats, promises and increase in page load speeds, and more.
Smartling offers a large, scale SEO-friendly realtime translation service for websites. The company has a hybrid model which allows you to pick between professional translators, machine translations, and crowdsourced translations. → Read More
It’s a rare startup that closes a $20 million venture round and doesn’t bother to mention it more more than half a year. But Cloudflare, the almost-winner of TechCrunch Disrupt: SF 2010, did just that. They raised a healthy $20 million last November, on top of a more modest $2.1 million raised in 2009. → Read More
Disrupt runners-up, Cloudflare have been getting a lot of attention recently, thanks to the company’s role in helping LulzSec’s website stay online. In fact the hackers even gave Cloudflare a shoutout on their Twitter feed — offering to trade rum for a premium account — leading to a surge in customer sign-ups.
Of course, co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince is quick to point out that the company takes — at best — a neutral approach to hosting LulzSec, and that protecting the hackers has only served to make Cloudflare’s systems more resilient for all of its other customers. Still, it’s a pretty ironic twist for a company which promises to protect websites against DDOS attacks and other nefarious activity.
Keen to understand the company’s position on helping hackers and on sharing user data with the authorities, I invited Prince into the TCTV studio for a quick interview. → Read More
Speed and security are essential for the success of any website, so a free service that supercharges your site and pr Speed and security are essential for the success of any website, so a free service that supercharges your site and protects it from those many web-born threats? Priceless. This is why CloudFlare was a runner-up at Disrupt SF last year, because it is attempting to bring speedy load times to the average site owner.
Though CloudFlare may not be the sexiest business in the world, it’s a service confronting a real problem, and for that very reason, nearly 12 percent of the Internet’s users (approximately 125 million unique monthly visitors) passed through CloudFlare’s network since its launch in September, according to CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince. CloudFlare, he continued, has been providing a 40 percent performance boost on average, and has stopped nearly 1 billion attacks launched against its users’ websites. Though the CEO did not specify what kind of attacks these are, the statistics (including 3.5 billion page views per month) are impressive nonetheless. → Read More
NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw visited Silicon Valley last month to meet immigrant entrepreneurs. At Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, he met with a dozen of them. More than half said that they might be forced to return to their home countries. That’s because they have the same visa issues that Kunal Bahl had. Unable to get a visa that would allow him to start a company after he graduated from Wharton in 2007, Kunal returned home to India. In February 2010, he started SnapDeal—India’s Groupon. Instead of creating hundreds of jobs in the U.S., Kunal ended up creating them in New Delhi.
At a time when our economy is stagnating, some American political leaders are working to keep the world’s best and brightest out. They mistakenly believe that skilled immigrants take American jobs away. The opposite is true: skilled immigrants start the majority of Silicon Valley startups; they create jobs. → Read More
Editor’s Note: The following guest post is by Matthew Prince, CEO of a CloudFlare, which came in as a close runner-up at the last TechCrunch Disrupt. We asked him to give us an update on the startup since Disrupt.
It’s hard to imagine a web performance and security service “going viral,” especially one Mike Arrington described during the Disrupt awards ceremony as “Muffler Repair for the Internet,” but a glance through our Twitter feed gives credence to one of Silicon Valley’s axioms: if you make a great service that solves a real problem, users will come.
And come they have! While I have to confess our engineering team was initially bummed about losing to a demo of a website that could read Wikipedia articles aloud, I’m happy to report that they’ve channeled any frustration into building an incredible service that improves the lives of millions of web users every day. A quick snapshot of the four months since our Disrupt launch: → Read More
The votes have been tallied. The judges have weighed in. A battlefield of twenty-seven startups was whittled down to a final, elite group of seven. And now the winner has been chosen: Qwiki has taken the top prize at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco.
In addition to a $50,000 grand prize, the company has just been handed the Disrupt Cup, taking over possession from Disrupt NYC winner Soluto. Upon receiving the cup, CEO Doug Imbruce exclaimed, “Let’s change the world!” → Read More
It’s no secret that performance can play a significant factor in a website’s success — keep your users waiting, and they’ll get impatient and head somewhere else. There are solutions available to help keep things speedy, like CDNs, but most smaller websites don’t use them. TechCrunch Disrupt finalist CloudFlare wants to bring these speedy load times to the masses, and it’s offering some other benefits too, including robust security protection against online threats. CEO Matthew Prince says that, in short, CloudFlare takes your average web admin and terms them into a full-fledged Ops team.
Prince says that speed issues can have a big impact on your site — one study showed that for every 100 milliseconds of time spent loading, you lose up to 2% of your visitors. He says CloudFlare offers an average of a 30% increase in speed and can “stop virtually all web spam attacks”. And he says that you can integrate it into your site in around five minutes. Oh, and it’s free, at least for its basic service. → Read More
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