As a leading cybersecurity provider, Cloudflare empowers businesses to navigate the evolving digital landscape. Since its founding in 2009, Cloudflare’s net worth has consistently risen, highlighting the power of its innovative solutions. As of September 2024, Cloudflare has a net worth of $26.79 billion and provides valuable strategic insights to business owners and potential opportunities to investors.
At Business2Community, we’ve consulted a wide range of sources to provide a detailed account of Cloudflare’s history and net worth. Keep reading to discover the cybersecurity company’s key milestones, revenue, controversies, and more.
Cloudflare Key Company Data
Date Founded: July 2009
Founded By: Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, Michelle Zatlyn
Current CEO: Matthew Prince
Industries: Technology, cybersecurity, cloud computing
Cloudflare Net Worth: $26.79 billion
Cloudflare Stock Ticker: NYSE: NET
Dividend Yield: 0%
What is Cloudflare’s Net Worth?
As of September 2024, Cloudflare’s net worth or market cap was $26.79 billion based on a share price of $78.40 and 341.7 million shares outstanding. The company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol NET and has traded its shares since its IPO in September 2019.
Cloudflare’s fiscal year ends on December 31st. The company typically releases its annual financial results in February of the following year.
Valued at $6.3 million in 2009, the company’s valuation surged to $1 billion in 2012 and $1.8 billion in 2015. By September 2019, when the company completed its IPO, it had an implied enterprise value of around $3.8 billion. By 2024, Cloudflare’s net worth had increased by an impressive 433.18%.
Cloudflare’s shares, initially priced at $15 per share, closed at $17.90 for a market cap of $5.25 billion on the first day of trading. After experiencing the highest jump in 2020, Cloudflare shares peaked at $217.25 in 2021 and experienced their steepest decline in 2022.
Overall, the company’s stock price increased 295% between 2019 and 2023, significantly outperforming the S&P 500’s 50% increase during the same period. While its shares have appreciated, the company’s financial performance has been mixed.
As of September 2024, Cloudflare’s stock price was $78.40, up from a 52-week low of $53.88 and down from a high of $116.00. With a price-to-book (P/B) ratio of 31.65, the market has placed a high valuation on the company relative to its book value. However, the negative return on equity (-13.39%) suggests that Cloudflare has struggled to generate profits from its invested capital.
Cloudflare Revenue
Cloudflare’s pre-IPO financial records show that the company generated $84.8 million in total revenue in 2016. Revenue grew by 127%, reaching $192.7 million in 2018, as the company expanded its customer base.
By 2020, Cloudflare’s revenue had doubled to over $431 million. The upward trend continued with the company’s revenue hitting $975.2 million in 2022 and crossing the $1 billion mark in 2023.
Despite its consistent revenue growth, Cloudflare has reported net losses every year since 2016. The company experienced a net loss of $260.3 million in 2021, $193.4 million in 2022, and $183.9 million in 2023, for an accumulated deficit of $1 billion.
| Year | Revenue ($ millions) | Income ($ millions) |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 84.8 | -17.3 |
| 2017 | 134.9 | -10.8 |
| 2018 | 192.7 | -87.2 |
| 2019 | 287.0 | -105.8 |
| 2020 | 431.0 | -119.4 |
| 2021 | 656.4 | -260.3 |
| 2022 | 975.2 | -193.4 |
| 2023 | 1,296.8 | -183.9 |
Who Owns Cloudflare?
As a public company, Cloudflare Inc. is owned by various shareholders. The largest shareholder as of June 2024 was Capital World Investors with a 10.98% ownership stake in the company. This was followed by Baillie Gifford and Company with 10.78% and the Vanguard Group with 9.82%.
In September 2009, Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn founded Cloudflare to stop internet threats. By November the trio had secured $2.25 million in Series A funding from Venrock and Pelion Venture partners.
2011 saw the company raise $20 million in a Series B funding round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). The next year, Cloudflare raised $50 million in a Series C funding round from Union Square Ventures and Greenspring Associates, along with existing investors NEA, Pelion Venture Partners, and Venrock.
In 2015, CloudFlare raised a further $110 million in a Series D funding round led by Fidelity and joined by Google Capital, Microsoft, Baidu, and Qualcomm Ventures.
Cloudflare raised $150 million in a Series E round of funding, led by Franklin Templeton in March 2019. In September of the same year, the company had its IPO, raising $525 million.
Who is the Cloudflare CEO?
The CEO of Cloudflare is Cloudflare co-founder Mathew Prince. Prince has been CEO since the company was founded in 2009 and has focused on Cloudflare’s expansion during his 15-year tenure.
The CEO received a total compensation of $20.52 million in 2023. This included a base salary of 1.9% and substantial bonuses (98.1%) consisting of company stock and options. He also holds a significant 8.56% of the company’s shares valued at approximately $2.41 billion.
In January 2024, a TikTok video posted by former account executive Brittany Pietsch sparked controversy around the company’s workplace culture, leadership, and HR practices.
The nine-minute video, which got over 11.8 million views, captured Pietsch’s dismissal, during which she repeatedly sought to understand the reasons behind her termination. However, the HR executives on the call were evasive and insisted that her performance had not met expectations. Pietsch countered these claims, asserting that she was a top performer and that she hadn’t received any communication from her manager regarding performance issues.
@viral.stuff70 Cloudflare employee being let go by company without reason. #cloudflare #fired #jobinterview #layoff
After speculation that the Cloudflare firing was a downsizing round stealthily disguised as a performance review, Cloudflare’s CEO weighed in. Prince defended the company’s HR practices, clarifying that only 40 sales employees out of over 1,500 were fired.
He called this a “normal” quarterly occurrence and emphasized that when the company was “doing performance management right”, they could often tell within 3 months or less of a sales hire, even during the holidays, whether someone was going to be successful or not.
“Sadly, we don’t hire perfectly. We try to fire perfectly. In this case, clearly, we were far from perfect. The video is painful for me to watch. Managers should always be involved. HR should be involved, but it shouldn’t be outsourced to them, No employee should ever actually be surprised they weren’t performing.”
Cloudflare’s Company History
Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Cloudflare is a global cloud services provider that delivers a broad range of services to make businesses more efficient and secure.
The company’s global impact is immense, with code pushes instantly affecting millions of internet properties. With thousands of new sign-ups daily, its infrastructure handles an average of 60 million HTTP requests per second. All of this is powered by Cloudflare’s massive global network which spans 330 cities in over 120 countries around the world.
Below, we track the company’s 15-year journey to prominence.
2009 – 2014: Cloudflare Takes Off
Founded in 2009 by the team that originally started Project Honey Pot – the largest open-source community tracking online fraud and abuse – Cloudflare was launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in September 2010. The company had been in private beta since June 2010, powering over 1,000 websites and serving more than 50 million page views by the time of its public launch.
Between 2010 and 2011, Cloudflare raised millions in equity funding to expand its team and infrastructure. By 2012, Cloudflare had 12 data centers worldwide and more than 10% of global internet users passed through its network monthly.
2013 saw Cloudflare, increase page views, revenue, and traffic across its network by more than 400%. The company also onboarded several high-profile customers, doubled its team, and opened a second office in London.
Cloudflare acquired anti-malware firm StopTheHacker for an undisclosed amount in 2014. The deal strengthened the company’s ability to detect malware and ensured its network couldn’t be used to distribute malware. It also acquired CryptoSeal, adding the virtual private network (VPN) company’s security expertise to its platform.
Cloudflare also invested in infrastructure growth, adding new data centers worldwide and expanding capacity across its network. This enabled the introduction of innovative features like Keyless SSL, WebSockets support, Universal SSL, CNAME flattening, SPDY/3.1, and more.
2015-2019: Cloudflare Goes Public
In 2015, the company focused on accelerating customer growth, extending its product ranges to meet the demands of large enterprises, and expanding into new international markets. By the end of the year, Cloudflare had expanded into more than 30 countries, bringing its data center count to 62 locations. It also had a global customer base exceeding four million.
To help reimagine its app platform, Cloudflare acquired Eager Platform Co for an undisclosed amount in 2016. That year, the company opened its 100th data center, revamped its brand image, and approached $100 million in annual revenue.
2017 saw the company announce 14 new products and acquire Neumob for an undisclosed amount to extend its benefits to mobile devices. Cloudflare also continued its expansion into enterprise services. The company grew its business by more than 80% to 2,000 enterprise customers and increased its average deal size by nearly 40% year-over-year.
By 2019, Cloudflare had secured over $330 million from high-profile investors to drive growth, expand its product line, and accelerate global expansion. The company’s network spanned 200 cities worldwide and protected more than 26 million internet properties.
Following a successful IPO, revenue surged 49% year-over-year. The company’s paid customer base increased by over 26% to 77,000. Additionally, the number of large customers (annualized billings exceeding $100,000) reached 475, representing 71% year-over-year growth.
2020-Present: Cloudflare Prioritizes Revenue Growth
To enhance Cloudflare for Teams and improve its ability to protect endpoints from zero-day vulnerabilities without sacrificing speed, website compatibility, or user experience, the company acquired S2 Systems Corporation for $39.2 million in January 2020.
As the pandemic added a new level of complexity to the threat landscape, Cloudflare focused on making strategic investments in its product offerings and expanding the flexibility and capacity of its network. Cloudflare also invested in its go-to-market efforts.
These efforts generated significant ROI, with large customers growing by 73% and their revenue contribution increasing by 90% to account for 50% of the company’s total revenue.
2021 was the fifth consecutive year that Cloudflare reported a compounded revenue growth of 50%. It also achieved a gross margin of 79%, above its long-term target gross margin range of 75% to 77%. The company capitalized on this exceptional gross margin, using it to capture market share from competitors who were more vulnerable to pricing and cost pressures.
To expand Zero Trust SaaS security, Cloudflare acquired Vectrix for $7.6 million in January 2022. A month later, the company acquired Area 1 Security for $162 million to bolster its email defense systems.
Throughout the year, Cloudflare delivered cost-effective solutions to enhance company performance and security in multi-cloud environments. As a result, despite economic headwinds, the company won the business of 32% of Fortune 500 companies and delivered a record $1 billion in annualized revenue.
Cloudflare’s substantial investments in its network assets enabled it to outpace other vendors in mitigating the unprecedented rise in large-scale DDoS attacks that characterized 2023.
Seeing a major opportunity in AI inference, Cloudflare doubled down on expanding AI capabilities across its network, launching Workers AI, the industry’s first serverless AI at scale.
The company’s customer acquisition efforts continued to pay off with customer growth increasing by 34% from 2022. Revenue performance remained strong and saw a 33% increase year-over-year.
In 2024, Cloudflare acquired Nefeli Networks to boost multi-cloud networking and BastionZero to extend Zero Trust access to IT infrastructure. The company’s growth was further fueled by record deals worth a total contract value (TCV) of $14.5 million.
Overall, revenue increased by 30% year-over-year in both quarters. This positioned Cloudflare for strong financial performance in 2024, with estimates placing total revenue for the year anywhere between $1.657 and $1.659 billion.
Cloudflare Controversies
As an internet infrastructure provider, Cloudflare has suffered minor leaks, outages, and breaches. However, the company’s most notable controversies have centered around moderation and its reluctance to intervene in such matters.
Notably, in 2019, Cloudflare refused to stop providing services to 8chan – a website known for violent extremism and explicitly white supremacist content – even after three mass shooters posted their hate-filled manifestos to the site before opening fire. 75 people died from the shootings, with 141 casualties in total. Only hours after the third shooting in El Paso, Texas, and the public outrage that ensued, did Cloudflare terminate its technical support for the site.
In 2022, Cloudflare once again found itself at the center of a scandal involving Kiwi Farms, a forum notorious for waging online harassment campaigns against LGBT people, women, and other marginalized groups.
When a well-known Twitch creator named Clara Sorrenti spoke out against anti-trans legislation in the United States, she became a target of the toxic community, enduring swatting, stalking, and threats that forced her to flee the country. In response to the harassment, Sorrenti launched a campaign to pressure Cloudflare into dropping Kiwi Farms. The issue went viral, and the hashtags #DropKiwiFarms and #CloudflareProtectsTerrorists trended on Twitter.
Again, Cloudflare was resistant to intervening in the matter. The company stated that doing so would be an abuse of power, setting a dangerous precedent that would most likely disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized communities over the long term.
But as the situation escalated, rhetoric and targeted threats on Kiwi Farms intensified. Citing an “unprecedented emergency” and “immediate threat to human life”, Cloudflare blocked the site and alerted authorities in multiple jurisdictions of the potential criminal acts posted to the site.
What Can We Learn From Cloudflare?
Cloudflare identified a gap in the market and built a range of internet infrastructure solutions to meet customer needs. The company’s strategy of rapidly launching products to early adopters, gathering feedback, and using iterative development to serve increasingly larger enterprises, has positioned Cloudflare as a crucial player in the cybersecurity industry.
By leveraging emerging technologies and focusing on continuous innovation, Cloudflare has outpaced competitors and experienced rapid growth.
While the company’s significant investment in research and development has contributed to consistent revenue growth, it has also resulted in ongoing net losses. Although this is not uncommon for growing tech companies, it raises concerns about the company’s long-term operational sustainability.
Co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn’s consistent leadership and vision have been instrumental in Cloudflare’s success. Additionally, the management team and board of directors — with an average tenure of 8 and 13.8 years, respectively — have contributed to a strong foundation of stability and continuity.
While this has contributed to strong core values, it has led to the company being drawn into controversial issues, particularly around internet moderation. Cloudflare’s challenges in this regard highlight the need to balance innovation with ethical considerations.
With its product offerings growing in complexity and targeting larger enterprises, the company continues to enhance its go-to-market strategy. Cloudflare has not only invested more in its sales and marketing but also brought on industry veterans to lead its sales and revenue strategies.
Cloudflare’s long-term success hinges on its ability to create and maintain long-term customer relationships. Recognizing the critical role of talent in achieving this goal, the company has prioritized attracting, motivating, and retaining employees at all levels.
However, recent negative press regarding employee treatment underscores the need to address human resource systems and internal challenges to ensure a positive, and supportive work environment that attracts and retains top talent.