A $110 million USD funding round from the world’s biggest venture partners is a hard piece of news to stay tight lipped on, but that’s exactly what Cloudflare have done.
The company has landed $110 million USD in funding led by Fidelity with participation from some of the biggest names in China and U.S. tech: Google Capital, Baidu, Microsoft and Qualcomm Ventures. It brings the company’s total funding to over $180 million at an approximate valuation of $1.05 billion.
Cloudflare, which offers content delivery and security, apparently shook hands on the latest round of funding at the end of last year but chose to only just disclose it. In the past week they have announced a partnership with Chinese search giant Baidu to expand its services in China.
“With this partnership, CloudFlare has become the only unified network that can provide performance and security to the entire world’s Internet population,” said CEO Matthew Prince at the time.
Cloudflare first announced its intentions to offer a local China version of its web security software in November last year, but according to Prince the deal with Baidu was a four year process. The company is now looking to extend its presence in China from 17 data centers to 50 in the next year.
This latest round of funding has invited Cloudflare into one of the best possible combinations of partner investors. Microsoft’s enterprise unit will be at Cloudflare’s fingertips, helping it to shift its product to large companies. Qualcomm’s chip tech is an obvious advantage while Baidu is a strong partner to help them navigate their China expansion.
Cloudflare’s security technology has a lot of applications in China, where internet speed can be slow for a variety of reasons and direct-denial-of-service (DDoS) security attacks are frequent. Cloudflare operates under a relatively unique system with their partner Baidu called a ‘virtual joint venture’, meaning they are able to effectively scale the Great Firewall without officially operating in the country from a legal perspective.
Cloudflare now works in over 30 countries and processes about 5 percent of the internet’s traffic according to the company.