CloudFlare, a company that offers content delivery network (CDN) services with a full range of security features to ensure websites load quickly and stay online across the globe, has already reached 4 million customers worldwide after expanding its wings to more than 30 countries.
Now, it seems the company has caught the attention of four international tech giants: Google Capital, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Baidu.
CloudFlare has announced in a blog post a $110 million funding round led by Fidelity Management and Research Co., with major strategic investments from Google Capital, Microsoft, Baidu and Qualcomm Incorporated (via its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures).
"There's an inevitability around our business," Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, said. "Traditional on-premise solutions such as firewalls, load balancers and DDoS mitigation appliances are becoming obsolete as organizations distribute their applications across geographies and cloud environments. CloudFlare offers these edge functions as a service without any additional hardware or software, irrespective of where the applications reside."
Some of the company's notable customers include Reddit, Cisco, NASDAQ, WikiLeaks and the World Economic Forum.
CloudFlare touts to protect the customer against a wide array of attacks, including cross-site scripting (XSS), distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), comment spam, Structured Query Language (SQL) injection, excessive bot crawling and more.
In the CDN market, it faces tough competition from Amazon Web Services (a top cloud provider), Fastly, Akamai, MaxCDN, Verizon's EdgeCast and Instart Logic.
To date, according to Prince, Amazon's strategy to offer CloudFront, a content delivery web service, combined with the store/compute and other application layers seems brilliant.
"It's exactly the same as Apple's strategy, which is to say, 'If you want to use iOS, you're going to use our hardware . . . you're going to use our music store, you're going to use our applications store,'" said Prince.
In a bid to create an alternative ecosystem, CloudFlare is partnering with the four international tech corporations.
Prince added that CloudFlare is expecting to reach a revenue of $100 million by the end of 2015. The initial public offering, according to the CEO, is possible as soon as 2017.
CloudFlare says it is open to partner with more vendors, including its rivals such as Alibaba and Amazon.
