This year, Cloudflare officially became a teenager, turning 13 years old. We celebrated this milestone with a series of announcements that benefit both our customers and the Internet community.

From developing applications in the age of AI to securing against the most advanced attacks that are yet to come, Cloudflare is proud to provide the tools that help our customers stay one step ahead.

We hope you’ve had a great time following along and for anyone looking for a recap of everything we launched this week, here it is:

When Cloudflare turned 12 last year, we announced the Workers Launchpad Funding Program - you can think of it like a startup accelerator program for companies building on Cloudlare’s Developer Platform, with no restrictions on your size, stage, or geography.

A refresher on how the Launchpad works: Each quarter, we admit a group of startups who then get access to a wide range of technical advice, mentorship, and fundraising opportunities. That includes our Founders Bootcamp, Open Office Hours with our Solution Architects, and Demo Day. Those who are ready to fundraise will also be connected to our community of 40+ leading global Venture Capital firms.

In exchange, we just ask for your honest feedback. We want to know what works, what doesn’t and what you need us to build for you. We don’t ask for a stake in your company, and we don’t ask you to pay to be a part of the program.

Targum (my startup) was one of the first AI companies (w/ @jamdotdev ) in the Cloudflare workers launchpad!

In return to tons of stuff we got from CF 🙏 they asked for feedback, and my main one was, let me do everything end to end on CF, I don't want to rent GPU servers… https://t.co/0j2ZymXpsL

— Alex Volkov (@altryne) September 27, 2023

Over the past year, we’ve received applications from nearly 60 different countries. We’ve had a chance to work closely with 50 amazing early and growth-stage startups admitted into the first two cohorts, and have grown our VC partner community to 40+ firms and more than $2 billion in potential investments in startups building on Cloudflare.

Next up: Cohort #3! Between recently wrapping up Cohort #2 (check out their Demo Day!), celebrating the Launchpad’s 1st birthday, and the heaps of announcements we made last week, we thought that everyone could use a little extra time to catch up on all the news - which is why we are extending the deadline for Cohort #3 a few weeks to October 13, 2023. AND we’re reserving 5 spots in the class for those who are already using any of last Wednesday’s AI announcements. Just be sure to mention what you’re using in your application.

So once you’ve had a chance to check out the announcements and pour yourself a cup of coffee, check out the Workers Launchpad. Applying is a breeze — you’ll be done long before your coffee gets cold.

That’s all for Birthday Week 2023. We hope you enjoyed the ride, and we’ll see you at our next innovation week!

i hate @Cloudflare launch week

most launch weeks are underwhelming

cloudflare always makes me rethink everything i’m doing

— Dax (@thdxr) September 29, 2023

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.

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:

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

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 updatesDrivly made their public launch at Demo Day!

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

Serverless GPU.

Demo Day pitch

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

Recent updatesGPUX launched v2 of their platform on Demo Day!

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 updatesGrafbase, 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.

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 updatesLearn more about how JEMPass works here.

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

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

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 updatesNinetailed 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.

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 updatesPatr was recently highlighted as a Product of the Day on Product Hunt!

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 updatesQRYN recently launched integrations with Cloudflare Log Push, Grafana, and others.

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 updatesQuest 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.

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

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 updatesTargum launched its platform to customers and passed $100K MRR in just one month! Check out their Built With Workers case study to learn more.

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 updatesTouchless has been growing their ecosystem and recently joined the RudderStack Solutions Partner Program.

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:

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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 Israeli 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.

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.

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 Workers-Launchpad@cloudflare.com.

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.