All posts by Mia Wang

Announcing Cohort #2 of the Workers Launchpad

Post Syndicated from Mia Wang original http://blog.cloudflare.com/launchpad-cohort2/

Announcing Cohort #2 of the Workers Launchpad

Announcing Cohort #2 of the Workers Launchpad

We launched the $2B Workers Launchpad Funding Program in late 2022 to help support the over one million developers building on Cloudflare’s Developer Platform, many of which are startups leveraging Cloudflare to ship faster, scale more efficiently, and accelerate their growth.

Cohort #1 wrap-up

Since announcing the program just a few months ago, we have welcomed 25 startups from all around the world into our inaugural cohort and recently wrapped up the program with the Demo Day. Cohort #1 gathered weekly for Office Hours with our Solutions Architects for technical advice and the Founders Bootcamp, where they spent time with Cloudflare leadership, preview upcoming products with our Developer Platform Product Managers, and receive advice on a wide range of topics such as how to build Sales teams and think about the right pricing model for your product.

Learn more about what these companies are building and what they’ve been up to below:

Authdog

Identity and Access Management streamlined.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare
“Cloudflare is the de facto Infrastructure for building resilient serverless products, it was a no-brainer to migrate to Cloudflare Workers to build the most frictionless experience for our customers.”

Recent updates
Learn more about how Authdog is using Cloudflare’s Developer Platform in their Built With Workers case study.

Drivly

Automotive Commerce APIs to Buy & Sell Cars Online.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare
“We believe that Cloudflare is the next-generation of cloud computing platforms, and Drivly is completely built on Cloudflare, from Workers, Queues, PubSub, and especially Durable Objects.”

Recent updates
Drivly made their public launch at Demo Day!

Flethy

Integrate APIs, the easy way.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare
“Simplicity and Performance. Using Pages and KV is extremely easy, but what really impresses are Workers with a nearly instant cold start!”

Recent updates
Check out how Cloudflare is helping Flethy improve and accelerate API service integrations for developers here.

GPUX

Serverless GPU.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare
“Cloudflare is core to the internet; R2, Transit, Workers with no egress charge.”

Recent updates
GPUX launched v2 of their platform on Demo Day!

Grafbase

The easiest way to build and deploy GraphQL backends.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare
“The Grafbase platform is built from the ground up to be highly performant and deployed to the edge using Rust and WebAssembly. Services like Cloudflare Workers, KV, Durable Objects, Edge Caching were a natural choice as it fits perfectly into our vision architecturally.”

Recent updates
Grafbase, which is building on Workers for Platforms among other Cloudflare products, celebrated their public launch and 7 new features in their April 2023 Launch Week.

JEMPass

Simple, seamless, and secure way to eliminate passwords.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare
“We found it to be the best fit for our needs: performant, and easy to develop on, easy to scale.”

Recent updates
Learn more about how JEMPass works here.

Karambit.ai

The last line of defense for the software supply chain.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare
“Cloudflare's developer products offer effortlessly powerful building blocks essential to scaling up product to meet strenuous customer demand while enabling our developers to deliver faster than ever.”

Recent updates
Karambit recently received a grant from the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation to help scale their commercial growth.

Narrative BI

A no-code analytics platform for growth teams that automatically turns raw data into actionable narratives.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare
“Our customers benefit as we improve the quality of insights for them by running advanced algorithms for finding unqualified data points and quickly solving them with the unlimited power of Cloudflare Workers.”

Recent updates
Learn more about how Cloudflare is helping Narrative BI improve the quality of insights they generate for customers here.

Ninetailed

API-first personalization and experimentation solution to give your customers blazing-fast experiences.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare
“Cloudflare’s developers platform allows us to fully deploy our everything-on-the-edge approach to both data and delivery means personalized experience cause zero loading lag and zero interruptions for the customer.”

Recent updates
Ninetailed recently launched integrations with Contentstack, Zapier, and other tools to improve and personalize digital customer experiences. Learn more on the Ninetailed blog and their Built with Workers case study.

Patr

Scalable, secure and cost-effective digital infrastructure, without the complexities of it.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare
“Workers provides us with a global network of edge compute that we can use to route data internally to our user's deployments, providing our users with infinite scale.”

Recent updates
Patr was recently highlighted as a Product of the Day on Product Hunt!

QRYN

Polyglot monitoring and edge observability.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare
“Polyglot, Secure, Cost-Effective Edge Observability – all powered by Cloudflare Workers and R2 Storage.”

Recent updates
QRYN recently launched integrations with Cloudflare Log Push, Grafana, and others.

Quest.ai

Quest is a code-generation tool that automatically generates frontend code for business applications.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare
“We chose Cloudflare's Workers and Pages product to augment our frontend code-gen to include backend and hosting capabilities.”

Recent updates
Quest has been hard at work expanding their platform and recently added animations, CSS grid, MUI & Chakra UI support, NextJS support, breakpoints, nested components, and more.

Rollup ID

Simple & Secure ‍User Access. Rollup is all your authentication and authorization needs bundled into one great package.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare
“We chose Cloudflare’s developer platform because it provides us all the tools to build a logical user graph at the edge. We can utilize everything from Durable Objects, D1, R2, and more to build a fast and distributed auth platform.”

Recent updates
Rollup ID recently made their public debut and has rolled out lots of new features since. Learn more here.

Targum

Translating videos at the speed of social media using AI.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare
“Cloudflare Stream allows us to compete with YouTube's scale while being a 1-person startup, and Cloudflare Workers handles millions of unique views on Targum without waking us up at night.”

Recent updates
Targum launched its platform to customers and hit $100K MRR in just a few days! Check out their Built With Workers case study to learn more.

Touchless

Fixing website platforms without code.

Demo Day pitch

Why they chose Cloudflare
“Workers and the Cloudflare developer platform have been pivotal in enabling us to modernize and enhance existing website platforms and grow their conversions by 5X with little to no code.”

Recent updates
Touchless has been growing their ecosystem and recently joined the RudderStack Solutions Partner Program.

Introducing Cohort #2 of the Workers Launchpad!

We have received hundreds of applications from startups from nearly 50 different countries. There were many AI or AI-related companies helping everyone from developers, to security teams and sales organizations. We also heard from many startups looking to improve developer tooling and collaboration, new social and gaming platforms, and companies solving a wide range of problems that ecommerce, consumer, real estate, and other businesses face today.

While these applicants are tackling a diverse set of real-world problems, the common thread is that they chose to leverage Cloudflare’s developer platform to build more secure, scalable, and feature-rich products faster than they otherwise could.

Without further ado, we are thrilled to announce the 25 incredible startups selected for Cohort #2 of the Workers Launchpad:

Announcing Cohort #2 of the Workers Launchpad

Here’s what they’re building, in their own words:

42able.ai Making AI available and accessible to all.
ai.moda Automate delegating tasks to both your bots and human workers with an MTurk compatible API.
Arrive GG Real-time CDN for gamers.
Astro All-in-one web framework designed for speed. Pull your content from anywhere and deploy everywhere, all powered by your favorite UI components and libraries.
Azule Azule delivers AI agents that interact with your customers.
Brevity Build better software, visually.
Buildless Buildless is a global build cache, like Cloudflare for compiled code; we cache artifacts and make them available over the internet to exponentially accelerate developer velocity.
ChainFuse no-code platform to build multi-model AI for your business.
ChatORG Collaborative ChatGPT for your team.
Clerk Clerk, the drop-in authentication and user management solution for React.
contribute.design OpenSource Software & Design collaboration made easy.
Drifting in Space Drifting in Space builds software that enables developers to use WebSockets to create real-time applications.
Eclipse AI Prevent churn with generative AI.
Embley Marketplace automation platform enabling businesses to scale better and faster.
Fudge Fudge makes websites faster.
Mixer Real world social on a generative AI stack.
Monosnap Monosnap is a secure productivity SaaS with B2B PLG strategy, complementing existing workflows.
Nefeli Networks Unified and declarative cloud network management.
Smplrspace The digital floor plan platform.
Speech Labs AI assistant helping with everyday tasks.
TestApp.io Mobile app testing made easy.
Tigris Data Serverless NoSQL database and search platform to help developers quickly and easily build any application.
tldraw tldraw is building an infinite canvas for developers.
Vantyr The programmatic authorization layer for SaaS.
WunderGraph WunderGraph: The Backend for Frontend framework.

We are looking forward to working with each of these companies over the next few months and sharing what they’re building with you.

If you’re building on Cloudflare’s Developer Platform, head over to @CloudflareDev or join the Cloudflare Developer Discord community to stay in the loop on Launchpad updates. In the early fall, we’ll be selecting Cohort #3 — apply early here!

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.

Announcing the first Workers Launchpad cohort and growth of the program to $2 billion

Post Syndicated from Mia Wang original https://blog.cloudflare.com/launchpad-fall-22/

Announcing the first Workers Launchpad cohort and growth of the program to $2 billion

This post is also available in 简体中文, 日本語, 한국어, Deutsch, Français, Español.

Announcing the first Workers Launchpad cohort and growth of the program to $2 billion

During Birthday Week 2022, we announced a $1.25 billion funding program for startups building on our developer platform, Cloudflare Workers. This was done in partnership with 26 leading VC firms who have been investing in or seeking to invest in Workers-based startups.

Today, we’re excited to reveal the first cohort of Launchpad Startups as well as 14 additional VC partners, bringing the Launchpad to $2 billion in potential funding from 40 VC firms in total.

Who are our new VC partners?

We are excited to welcome 14 additional firms to the Workers Launchpad, which you can find included in the image below. They have worked with hundreds of companies that have grown to become leaders in their areas including Asana, Canva, Figma, Netlify, Vercel, Area 1 Security (which Cloudflare acquired in 2022), and many others. Notably, they also represent a diverse group of investors who support startups across North and South America, Europe, and Asia.

Announcing the first Workers Launchpad cohort and growth of the program to $2 billion

Many of these investors have seen the competitive advantages of building on Workers through their own portfolio companies firsthand and are looking forward to providing the capital and resources you need to build and scale your business.

Announcing the Fall 2022 cohort of Launchpad Startups!

We received hundreds of applications for the Fall cohort from startups representing more than 30 countries. We were blown away by the breadth of businesses that folks were building – some are creating tools to simplify developer workflows, while others are helping ecommerce businesses better reach and serve customers around the world. The common thread amongst all the Launchpad companies, however, is their usage of Cloudflare’s developer platform to build more secure, reliable, and feature-rich products faster than they otherwise could.

Introducing the Fall 2022 cohort

Announcing the first Workers Launchpad cohort and growth of the program to $2 billion

Our inaugural cohort of Launchpad startups features 25 diverse businesses. Here’s what they’re building, in their own words:

AIDEM Privacy first, sustainable, transparent digital advertising.
Apyfy The data privacy & security firewall.
Authdog Identity & access management streamlined.
Axiom Logging solved, at any scale.
BlocPal Unlocking accessible & affordable financial services for all.
COPILOT TRAVEL Next-generation infrastructure for global travel data.
Data Narratives Data superpowers for growth teams.
Drivly APIs to buy and sell cars online.
Endear Retail CRM for consumer brands.
flethy Design. Configure. Automate.
GPUX Serverless GPU inference.
Grafbase The easiest way to build and deploy GraphQL backends.
JEMPass Authentication made simple, seamless, secure.
Karambit.AI Stop software supply chain attacks.
KubeLT Simple and secure user identity for supercharging your user experience.
Narrative BI No-code analytics platform for growth teams.
Ninetailed Composable personalization and experimentation solution for digital builders.
Nostra.ai Predictive commerce edge delivery engine to boost conversion rates.
Patr Deploy and scale your applications in 60 seconds.
Quest.ai Generate front-end code from designs automatically.
qxip Polyglot monitoring and edge observability.
repeat.dev Create. Deploy. Repeat. The one-stop-shop for your webhooks & scheduled tasks.
Service Loom Start a service business in 3 minutes.
Targum Translating videos at the speed of social media using AI.
Touchless The fastest sites, with no code.

Is it too late to join the Launchpad?

Nope! We will select Launchpad Startups on a quarterly basis, so if you are building on Workers, interested in pitching VCs, and want to join our next cohort of Workers Founder, apply here! If you’re new to Workers and looking to begin building, check out our Startup Plan for a year of free Cloudflare services, Built with Workers, and join our Cloudflare Developer Discord community.

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.

The world’s leading venture capitalist firms commit $1.25 BILLION to back startups built on Cloudflare Workers

Post Syndicated from Mia Wang original https://blog.cloudflare.com/workers-launchpad/

The world’s leading venture capitalist firms commit $1.25 BILLION to back startups built on Cloudflare Workers

The world’s leading venture capitalist firms commit $1.25 BILLION to back startups built on Cloudflare Workers

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.

Announcing the Workers Launchpad funding program

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.

Who are the VCs that you might get a chance to pitch to?

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:

The world’s leading venture capitalist firms commit $1.25 BILLION to back startups built on Cloudflare Workers

More on why we’re doing this

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.

The world’s leading venture capitalist firms commit $1.25 BILLION to back startups built on Cloudflare Workers

Dogfooding our own product

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 Isareli 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.

But wait, there’s more!

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.

Helping make the Internet better for all

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 [email protected].

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.