Cloudflare’s “Workers Launchpad” announces its first cohort of startups

Cloudflare, Inc., the security, performance, and reliability company assisting in the development of a better Internet, announced today that the Workers Launchpad Funding Program has grown to $2 billion for potential investment in startups built on Cloudflare Workers, an increase of 14 partners and $750 million in less than two months. Cloudflare is also introducing the program’s first cohort of startups, which includes 25 companies from ten countries.

“When we set out to debut the Workers Launchpad, we were aiming for $250 million and surpassed that goal by a mile when we hit $1.25 billion. To reach $2 billion is a big deal, and one that proves the industry trusts in the potential of our global network” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare. “As we hit 1 million developers building and maintaining applications with Cloudflare, there’s no better time to continue investing in the developers using Cloudflare.”

The Cloudflare Workers Launchpad funding program was launched in September 2022 to provide up to $1.25 billion in funding to startups building applications on Cloudflare Workers, a highly scalable serverless computing platform that allows developers to build or augment apps without configuring or maintaining infrastructure. In the days and weeks that followed, Cloudflare received a surge in global interest from venture capitalists interested in joining the program. Cloudflare has added 14 new venture capital partners to the program, bringing regional expertise from Australia and Latin America to the mix.

New venture partners include:

• 8VC: “We’re extremely excited to be backing the next generation of founders building at the edge on top of Cloudflare Workers. At 8VC, we partner with founders to build transformational technologies that create long-term value for the economy and society as a whole. We believe that serverless infrastructure will enable a new generation of transformational technologies in the area of multi-modal, data and AI driven applications,” said Bhaskar Ghosh (BG), Partner and CTO at 8VC.
• AirTree: “AirTree partners with Australia and New Zealand’s top founders, right from the start. Seeing enterprises like Cloudflare deliver value to startups developing on the next generation in edge computing is only a win for the global tech ecosystem, and enables founders to focus on what matters most: building category-defining companies,” said John Henderson, Partner at AirTree.
• Alumni Ventures: “We’re looking to back the next wave of innovative entrepreneurs and businesses. We believe the Cloudflare Workers platform will be a critical component for founders as they build innovative apps and products. We’re thrilled to be partnering with Cloudflare on this initiative,” said Wesley Yiu, Senior Principal at Alumni Ventures.
• B Capital: “Workers provides the technology and infrastructure to founders excited to build next generation products, and B Capital is proud to work alongside of these great innovators to provide insights and capital to grow in a bold way from the start,” said Karen Page, General Partner at B Capital.
• Benhamou Global Ventures: “The next generation of apps will be built in a distributed way and at the edge to meet the consumer demands of latency, performance, and scale. We are excited to partner with the Cloudflare Workers Fund and support the entrepreneurs building this next wave of enterprise startups,” said Yash Hemaraj, Partner at BGV.
• Chamaeleon: “At Chamaeleon, we look forward to collaborating with Cloudflare’s Workers Launchpad, by bringing the firm, our unique quant & tech platform, and our #KIN members to the forefront of our value-add to this pioneering ecosystem,” said Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Chamaeleon.
• Conversion Capital: “The Cloudflare Workers platform provides the building blocks to usher in a new era of serverless infrastructure, which is drastically reshaping large parts of the global economy run on software. We are excited to partner with Cloudflare and help accelerate this transition,” said Christian Lawless, General Partner at Conversion Capital.
• Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley): “We have a culture of continued learning and long-term thinking, and are uniquely positioned to partner with like-minded companies over the course of their lifecycle. Given Workers’ incredible innovation platform, we are excited to support the next generation of businesses emerging from Cloudflare’s dynamic and growing ecosystem,” said Dennis Lynch, Head of Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley).
• GGV: “We’ve been amazed by how quickly the Workers ecosystem has blossomed and are already seeing some of the most innovative founders we know building serverless products on top of or closely tied into Cloudflare. As more startups look to build on Workers from day one, we’re very excited about supporting the ecosystem,” said Dan Cahana, Investor at GGV Capital.
• IGNIA: “IGNIA’s focus of partnering with world-class tech entrepreneurs in Latin America aims to ensure the best technology can scale in and out of the region. Cloudflare Workers’ ability to have code running in minutes around the world gives so much potential to the entrepreneurs we want to see succeed,” said Alvaro Rodríguez Arregui, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at IGNIA.
• Kleiner Perkins: “For five decades, Kleiner Perkins has partnered with founders at the earliest stages of company formation. Many of these companies were enabled by advances in computing, from the PC, to mobile, to cloud. The Cloudflare Workers Launchpad program stands to advance the next wave – serverless computing. We’re excited to be a part of the global platform they are building to support builders in this rapidly growing ecosystem,” said Bucky Moore, Partner, Kleiner Perkins.
• Nauta Capital: “Thrilled to partner with Cloudflare on this Workers Launchpad Funding Program. Nauta Capital has been keenly following the technology disruptions in enterprise infrastructure software for decades, and developers are increasingly interested in spending time on the ‘core problem’, leaving infrastructure to be handled for them. Cloudflare provides a powerful platform for some of these new ideas to take shape,” said Pratima Aiyagari, Venture Partner at Nauta Capital.
• Primary VC: “At Primary, we love building with founders from the ground up. Cloudflare Workers has the performance and scale that founders need to build a category-defining company and we’re eager to partner with the teams using this powerful platform,” said Brian Schechter, Partner at Primary VC.
• Unusual Ventures: “Founders want to focus on creating products that matter. To do that, they need partners and infrastructure that allow them to efficiently run secure, scalable applications. That’s why we’re excited to partner with Cloudflare on Workers Launchpad: to enable founders and teams with the tools they need to reach product-market fit and beyond,” said Wei Lien Dang, General Partner at Unusual Ventures.

Introducing the Workers Launchpad’s Fall 2022 Cohort In addition, Cloudflare has announced the Fall 2022 cohort of 25 entrepreneurs from around the world, who were chosen from hundreds of applicants from over 30 countries. Apyfy, which is working on data privacy, and Grafbase, which is accelerating backend software development, are both cohort finalists. Startups from Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, India, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States are among those in the cohort. The cohort will be able to pitch VC partners for investment, receive technical advice and support, attend a virtual boot camp led by Cloudflare leaders and VC partners, and showcase their businesses at a Demo Day.

• “Apyfy aims to provide a privacy firewall that solves data privacy challenges in the health care, financial service and ecommerce industries. We use Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects to enable privacy-preserving computation across a global network. Cloudflare also solves our customers’ data sovereignty and data residency requirements while providing massive compute power, and minimal latency,” said John Childs-Eddy, Cofounder of Apyfy.
• “Grafbase is the easiest way to build and deploy GraphQL backends. We set out with Cloudflare thanks to their global network and serverless FaaS platform without cold starts, with the goal to simplify and speed up backend development for frontend and mobile developers,” said Fredrik Björk, Founder and CEO of Grafbase.

“We’ve been blown away by the engagement and excitement the venture capital firms have shown when they saw the caliber of applicants,” said Mia Wang, M&A and Strategy Director at Cloudflare. “The selection process for the first cohort has been collaborative and we’re looking forward to connecting startups directly with VCs in the coming weeks.”

A Million Developers Building With Cloudflare Cloudflare announced earlier this week that 1 million developers are using Cloudflare to build and maintain enterprise-ready applications. Cloudflare provides the tools to make building and maintaining applications cheaper, faster, and easier for developers with Workers features like Pages, Durable Objects, R2 and D1, and application services like rate limiting, load balancing, bot management, and more.