Tag Archives: Workers Launchpad

What AI companies are building with Cloudflare

Post Syndicated from Veronica Marin original http://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-companies-building-cloudflare/

What AI companies are building with Cloudflare

What AI companies are building with Cloudflare

What AI applications can you build with Cloudflare? Instead of us telling you we reached out to a small handful of the numerous AI companies using Cloudflare to learn a bit about what they’re building and how Cloudflare is helping them on their journey.

We heard common themes from these companies about the challenges they face in bringing new products to market in the ever-changing world of AI ranging from training and deploying models, the ethical and moral judgements of AI, gaining the trust of users, and the regulatory landscape.  One area that is not a challenge is trusting their AI application infrastructure to Cloudflare.

Azule.ai

What AI companies are building with Cloudflare

Azule, based in Calgary, Canada, was founded to apply the power of AI to streamline and improve ecommerce customer service. It’s an exciting moment that, for the first time ever, we can now dynamically generate, deploy, and test code to meet specific user needs or integrations. This kind of flexibility is crucial to create a tool like Azule that is designed to meet this demand, offering a platform that can handle complex requirements and provide flexible integration options with other tools.

The AI space is evolving quickly and that applies to the rapid evolution of AI agent design patterns. These are essentially frameworks built upon LLM APIs, and they're showing immense potential. Azule effectively allows users to create AI agents which interact with their customers on behalf of their business. It's not just about addressing customer service queries anymore – AI agents can perform significant, ongoing tasks across various industries.

Azule is built entirely on Cloudflare, except for API calls to OpenAI.

The application relies on multiple Developer Platform and Cloudflare products and services.  Durable Objects and websockets are used for live chat.

“Durable Objects enabled us to build our MVP faster than we could have on any other platform, thanks to Cloudflare's thoughtful product design.” – Logan Grasby

Other products used by Azule:

  • Queues for data processing.
  • R2 for all data storage, including vector storage. Instead of using a vector database service, Azule relies entirely on Cloudflare's R2 and cache API for on-disk vector search.
  • Workers KV for storing frequently accessed configuration data.
  • D1 was implemented for their user database.
  • Constellation (now Workers AI) for various labeling and summarization tasks.
  • Workers for Platforms allows Azule AI to write and deploy custom features for the users.
  • Pages for hosting our landing page and marketing content.

Other valuable features used include API shield, email workers, the mail channels integration for email, log push, outbound workers, among others!

“I firmly believe that AI agents are at home on the web. Everything Cloudflare builds has web optimization in mind and so it only makes sense to invest in the platform. By building on Cloudflare, we've made significant cost reductions, particularly by moving all our search solutions to R2. For example, many of our users want to store large datasets on Azule and make them searchable through their agents. Our previous search solutions, based on Pinecone and Milisearch, would have cost thousands of dollars per month to store and search through just one customer's data. With Cloudflare's R2 and cache API, we can now enable our customer's AI agent to comb through large datasets in less than 900ms, at a fraction of the cost.” – Logan Grasby

42able.ai

42able, headquartered in Wales, UK, is at the forefront of AI-driven solutions, dedicated to revolutionizing engagement with business documents. Through cutting-edge technology and innovative strategies, the company seeks to streamline, enhance, and redefine the way businesses interact with their documents.

The modern business landscape is inundated with vast volumes of documents, from contracts and reports to invoices and internal communications. Navigating, understanding, and extracting value from these documents can be time-consuming, error-prone, and often requires significant manual effort.

42able envisions a future where business documents are not just static pieces of information but dynamic assets that businesses can engage with interactively, efficiently, and intelligently.

“Launching an AI product has come with many unique challenges and uncertainties. Users expect AI to be perfect or near-perfect, and are much less forgiving of an AI making an error compared to a human making the same mistake. Decisions about how AI systems should act often involve moral or ethical judgments, which might not be straightforward and can be subject to societal debates. Training and deploying AI models is challenging. Cloudflare's solutions are making it much easier, than managing all the individual parts ourselves.” – James Finney

42able chose Cloudflare for fantastic performance in comparison to other cloud providers, in part due to the no cold boot times, competitive pricing, ease of use, fantastic local development features, and brilliant support. Their development times have decreased through the use of:

  • Workers for all the APIs and re-occurring cron scripts.
  • Pages for all application/platform front-end hosting
  • KV for Angular apps.
  • R2 to store cached personal user data R2.
  • General DNS zone management
  • DDOS protection
  • DNS management
  • Turnstile
  • Zero Trust to secure login pages

They are starting to test with Constellation (now Workers AI) to host some of their models and D1 to support their database needs.

UseChat

What AI companies are building with Cloudflare

UseChat.ai, based in London, UK, supercharges customer support with a ChatGPT powered chatbot that knows your website and everything on it. With a custom ChatGPT chatbot, customers can get instant answers to the most common questions. When a customer needs more support, UseChat.ai will seamlessly hand over from AI to human live chat.

The fully real-time platform was built to take advantage of Workers and Durable Objects from day one. Workers & Durable Objects power the real-time chatbot, integrated with OpenAI ChatGPT API, Queues manages website content crawling, and KV stores crawled website content.

“It wouldn’t have been possible to build and scale our real-time platform as quickly as we did without Workers & Durable Objects. Knowing that a customer can embed our chatbot on their website with millions of visitors, and it will just work lets me sleep sound at night.” – Damien Tanner

Eclipse AI

What AI companies are building with Cloudflare

Eclipse’s mission is to revolutionise the way businesses approach customer feedback. Based in Melbourne, Australia, Eclipse empowers users to make data-driven decisions by leveraging AI for comprehensive customer understanding. If your goals are to; reduce churn, drive growth or improve your customer experience, Eclipse puts the data at your fingertips and provides you actionable insights to drive your business.

Eclipse allows you to unify your Voice of Customer channels (i.e. phone, video calls, emails, support tickets, public reviews and surveys), the platform analyses it at scale and utilises Generative AI to provide key actions specific to your business. Focused on democratising data driven decision-making, Eclipse AI has launched a Freemium model, leveling the playing field for businesses of all sizes to utilise this tech.

“We believe the future of the internet is on the edge and Cloudflare is at the forefront of this revolution with a growing network that covers most major cities around the world. As a startup with limited resources, the Cloudflare developer platform has enabled our dev team to focus on building our product and not be burdened with managing infrastructure. Best of all, it scales automagically with a pay-as-you-go pricing model.” – Saad Irfani

Eclipse AI uses:

  • Cloudflare Workers for the backend API.
  • Cloudflare Pages for the frontend to deliver content across hundreds of cities worldwide.
  • Cloudflare Images to serve cascaded versions of each asset
  • Cloudflare R2 as the object store.

“As a platform that transcribes video/audio call recordings for VoC analytics, choosing a reliable object-store was an important decision. After the launch of R2 we switched from S3 and noticed a staggering 70% reduction in cost. Overall, we are believers in Cloudflare’s vision and are eagerly awaiting the release of D1 so that our entire stack can be powered by the edge.” – Saad Irfani

Embley

What AI companies are building with Cloudflare

Embley, based in Sierre, Switzerland, is a Marketplace Automation Platform that powers the future of marketplace commerce by enabling businesses to scale better and faster.

The platform combines the most advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Process Mining to strengthen a fast end-to-end business process automation with products tailored to marketplaces businesses.

Cloudflare powers Embley’s frontend through Cloudflare Pages that serves what they call the “control center” to the users at the edge. The control center is the core of the back-office tools that users use to manage their marketplace operations.  The backend is powered by Workers, providing a serverless execution environment, connected to the frontend through the Cloudflare API Gateway.

“The primary reasons for choosing Cloudflare are the powerful serverless products that enable us to run an entire tech stack without having to care about infrastructure. Also, the scalability of Cloudflare’s global network is appealing. Finally, security is embedded into Cloudflare through the Zero Trust platform that enable us to secure both production but also the lower environments including the secured access to internal systems and apps.” – Laurent Christen

Chainfuse

What AI companies are building with Cloudflare

ChainFuse, based in San Francisco, CA, is a multichannel AI platform that assists organizations in collecting and analyzing user feedback on a large scale. Their AI-powered community tool aids support, community, and product teams in garnering valuable insights, facilitating more informed product decisions.

“We have used Google Cloud and AWS, but our experience with Cloudflare has particularly stood out. Since 2016, we have consistently chosen Cloudflare for our projects due to their excellent product range and reliable performance. Saying "it just works" is an understatement.” – Victor Sanchez

ChainFuse relies on Workers for the core of their backend infrastructure and a range of our security solutions to secure their applications and employees. WAF and its vast adaptability is a major defense, blocking an average of 48% of all incoming traffic, effectively weeding out known malicious traffic. Additionally, it employs rate limiting to prevent abuse. API Shield, used in conjunction with WAF, intercepts an average of 1.32% of the incoming traffic that manages to bypass WAF. The Zero Trust Gateway not only secures their employees but also is integrated into their product to prevent end users from exploiting the platform for malicious purposes.

ai.moda

ai.moda, headquartered in Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, is building multiple AI tools with a focus on helping bridge humans, developers, and machines together. They’re currently building several ChatGPT plugins (such as CVEs and S3 storage), YourCrowd (MTurk compatible API for humans and bots), and Valkyrie (an automated zero-trust hardening for Linux applications and cloud workloads).

Plugins like CVEs by ai.moda bring real-time vulnerability information into ChatGPT.

What AI companies are building with Cloudflare

“By using Workers, we’re able to create SaaS services at a scale and cost that just wouldn’t be possible without. If you want a new ChatGPT plugin, let us know on Friday, and by Monday we can have it developed and shipped in production! The rapid development allowed by Workers is a huge advantage for us.”- David Manouchehri

They chose Cloudflare mainly because of the Workers platform. Being able to deploy new code rapidly globally with a single command has greatly simplified their DevOps needs, and they no longer need to worry about whether they have enough resources to scale up.

ai.moda is a heavy user of Cloudflare Workers, Email Workers, Pages, R2, Durable Objects, Constellation (now Workers AI), Cache API, DMARC management, Access, WAF, logpush, DNS, Health Checks, Zaraz, and D1.

We share the opinion of many of these companies that witnessing the incredible breadth and versatility of AI technology and the impact it has on organizations and people is astonishing, and we can’t wait to see where this technology takes people. If you’re inspired by reading these stories and want to start building, check out the Startup program and our Cloudflare for AI solutions.

If you want to share your story about what you’ve built, reach out to us or join the Developers Discord.

What AI companies are building with Cloudflare

***
Since launching the Launchpad program in 2022, we have showcased a number of exciting startups looking to build the next big application. Whether innovative website designs, content delivery or AI-based features, the internet is waiting for the next big thing.

With that said, we are proud to announce our revamped Built With Workers site, an opportunity to showcase your projects with the developer community. Built With Workers will serve as a public facing repository of full-stack applications running on the Developer Platform to demonstrate how Cloudflare is helping developers build amazing applications.

Whether you're using R2 object storage to store web data, utilizing Workers to manage your application functionality or designing the next big web application UI with Pages, we love seeing what our customers are building!

To showcase your latest and greatest projects featured on Built with Workers, complete and submit our quick form to share your projects or business with us. Share how you're using Cloudflare products to build the application of your dreams or help expand developer knowledge with our developer community.

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.

Build your next startup on Cloudflare with our comprehensive Startup Plan, v2.0

Post Syndicated from Jade Q. Wang original https://blog.cloudflare.com/startup-program-v2/

Build your next startup on Cloudflare with our comprehensive Startup Plan, v2.0

Build your next startup on Cloudflare with our comprehensive Startup Plan, v2.0

Starting a business is hard. And we know that the first few years of your business are crucial to your success.

Cloudflare’s Startup Plan is here to help.

Last year, we piloted a program to a select group of startups for free, with a selection of products that are very high leverage for young startups, early in their product development, like Workers, Stream, and Zero Trust.

Over the past year, startup founders repeatedly wrote into [email protected], and most of these emails followed one of 2 patterns:

  1. A startup would like to request additional products that are not a part of the startup plan, often Workers KV, Pages, Cloudflare for SaaS, R2, Argo, etc.
  2. A startup that is not a part of any accelerator program but would like to get on the startup plan.

Based on this feedback, we are thrilled to announce that today we will be increasing the scope of the program to also include popularly requested products! Beyond that, we’re also super excited to be broadening the eligibility criteria, so more startups can qualify for the plan.

What does the Cloudflare Startup Plan include?

There’s a lot of additional value that’s in the latest version of the plan. Here’s how things have evolved from v1.0:

Product Description v1.0 v2.0*
Content Delivery Network (CDN) Cloudflare’s CDN is a distributed network of servers that provides several advantages for a website. By caching website content, Cloudflare helps improve page load speeds, reduce bandwidth usage, and reduce CPU usage on the server. ✓ ✓
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Cloudflare WAF protects a customer’s Internet properties from common vulnerabilities like SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting, and cross-site forgery requests, with no changes to its existing infrastructure. ✓ ✓
DNS Cloudflare DNS is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service that offers the fastest response time, unparalleled redundancy, and advanced security with built-in DDoS mitigation and DNSSEC. ✓ ✓
Advanced DDoS Protection Cloudflare DDoS protection secures websites, applications, and entire networks while ensuring the performance of legitimate traffic is not compromised. ✓ ✓
Page Rules Page Rules allows you to conditionally change zone settings such as security level or rocket loader settings. It is also how cache settings are configured for traffic passing through the zone. ✓ ✓
Workers Cloudflare Workers allows developers to augment existing applications or create entirely new ones through a lightweight execution environment without configuring or maintaining infrastructure. ✓ ✓
Stream Cloudflare Stream provides out-of-the-box video infrastructure that handles storage, encoding, and delivery. Using the Stream API, customers can build video functionality affordably and with minimal engineering effort. ✓ ✓
Zero Trust Cloudflare Zero Trust replaces legacy security perimeters with our global edge, making the Internet faster and safer for teams around the world. ✓ ✓
R2 Cloudflare R2 Storage allows developers to store large amounts of unstructured data without the costly egress bandwidth fees associated with typical cloud storage services.

✓
Pages Cloudflare Pages allows frontend developers to quickly and easily build, collaborate on, and deploy websites. ✓
Workers KV Workers KV is a global, low-latency, key-value data store. It supports high read volumes with low-latency, making it possible to build highly dynamic APIs and websites which respond as quickly as a cached static file would. ✓
Workers Unbound Workers Unbound is a serverless platform for compute-intensive workloads, supporting up to 30s CPU time (GA), and 15 minute cron triggers (beta). ✓
Cloudflare for SaaS Offers the benefits of Cloudflare’s SSL management to SaaS company’s customers. Allows SaaS customers to use their custom vanity domains while maintaining a branded customer experience, improved SEO rankings, and all the perks of dedicated certificates.

✓
Advanced Certificate Manager (ACM) Advanced Certificate Manager is a flexible and customizable way to issue and manage certificates in Cloudflare. Customers use Advanced Certificate Manager when they want something more customizable than Universal SSL but still want the convenience of SSL certificate issuance and renewal.

✓
Image Resizing Resize images for a variety of device types and connections from a single-source master image. Images can be manipulated by dimensions, compression ratios, and format (WebP conversion where supported). It is a feature of Speed→Optimization on the Dashboard. ✓
Images Cloudflare Images lets you set up an image pipeline in minutes. Build a scalable image pipeline to store, resize, optimize and deliver images in a fast and secure manner. ✓
Argo Smart Routing Argo Smart Routing improves Internet performance by intelligently routing end users through less congested and more reliable paths over the Internet using our network. ✓
Spectrum DDoS protection, firewalling features and performance benefits for any TCP or UDP based application (such as gaming, FTP, email etc.) ✓
Load Balancing Improve application performance and availability by steering traffic away from unhealthy origin servers and dynamically distributing it to the most available and responsive server pools. ✓
Rate Limiting Protect your site or API from malicious traffic by blocking client IP addresses that hit a URL pattern and exceed a threshold you define. ✓
Waiting Room Cloudflare Waiting Room allows organizations to route excess users to a custom-branded waiting room, helping preserve customer experience and protect origin servers from being overwhelmed with requests. ✓
Area 1 Email Security Comprehensive email security solution to eliminate the risk from phishing, which is the root cause of damage in 95% of all cybersecurity incidents. Configuration with Google and Microsoft in 5 minutes. ✓

*Product-specific usage limits apply

With the expanded product basket, the Startup Plan v2.0 provides four times the value of the original program. As an added bonus when new Cloudflare products are in beta, participants on the Startup Plan are welcome to share their use case and potentially receive early access.

How to join the Cloudflare Startup Program

Eligibility criteria for startups new to the program

To be eligible for the Startup Plan, your startup must be at an early stage (i.e. raised less than $3 million) and enrolled or recently graduated from a participating accelerator program.

If you are a founder in a participating accelerator program, navigate to the Cloudflare perk from your program’s vendor perk page and follow the instructions there. Those instructions will lead you to this plan page where you can select your program from the list.

If your accelerator program is not on the list, please email us at [email protected] and include the details of your perk manager. We’ll get in touch with them directly.

What if I’m already on the V1 Startup Plan? Can I get access to the products on the V2 plan?

Yes! Startups currently on the Startup Plan will automatically have the additional products added to your accounts in the coming weeks, no action required. This upgrade will apply for the remainder of the year that your company is on the Startup Plan.

If you have any questions about making the most of your plan, drop a line to [email protected] with any questions.

Special Eligibility: Referral Program, Alumni Program, Workers Launchpad

Over our years at Cloudflare, we have had the privilege of working with some remarkable technologists who have gone on to work on extraordinary projects after their time at Cloudflare. Moreover, there are startup founders who interface with teams at Cloudflare, whether through participation in the Cloudflare Community or because they were former coworkers elsewhere.

These startups are now also eligible:

  • Workers Launchpad funding program: If you are building on Cloudflare Workers, simultaneously apply for the Workers Launchpad funding program here, which will make you eligible for introductions to leading investors, additional mentorship opportunities, and other perks.
  • Referral Program: “Referred by (include details in comments)” is now an option in the Select Accelerator dropdown menu on the Startup Plan landing page. Please include the email address of your contact at Cloudflare in the comments field. Your account will be upgraded once your contact validates the referral.
  • Alumni Program: “Cloudflare Alumni” is now also an option in the Select Accelerator dropdown menu.

Questions about the program? Drop us a line at [email protected], and we’ll be in touch.