The Web security and performance company CloudFare said that exactly a year ago, it had raised $50 million in a Series C round "secret" funding. The fundings were used to grow the company's user-base and expand its capacity by four folds across its 23 global data centers.
CloudFare's co-founder Michelle Zatlyn explains why it was kept secret. "We've been on a mission to build a better Internet, and we did not feel we needed to make a big deal of the funding to do that," said Zatlyn.
The round of funding was led by the new investors Union Square Ventures and Greenspring along with its existing investors NEA, Pelion Venture Partners and Venrock.
"The ethos in the Valley is to pump your fist and pound your chest when you raise money, but that's not our ethos," said co-founder Matthew Prince in an interview. "Oftentimes, you raise money on promises of what you're going to do, not what you've done. We wanted to do it differently."
CloudFare offers website owners protection from online threats, optimizes the content across multiple devices and also speeds up page load time. Ironically, CloudFare is one such company that has faced biggest DDoS attacks in the history of the internet.
The company has claimed that this year alone, it has signed up more than 1.5 million users, doubling the number from last year. The total number of CloudFare's user-base accounts for nearly 5 percent of web requests made across the internet. Also, statistically one in every 20 sites are using the CloudFare's services.
Without specifying the sales numbers, CloudFare said its revenue increased 450 percent and will probably become profitable in January.
After the latest revelation, total funding for CloudFare totals $77 million till date. Reports are that the current valuation of the company measures far greater than $1.2 billion that was evaluated last year.
