How many players are there in this space? Replicate, RunPod, Modal, Northflank, FAL, ... Who are the big ones? It's pretty crowded, right?
FAL was smart. They ditched the "run any model" to focus on just image and video, and now they dominate that space. They raised a pretty substantial round recently. Though I don't think there's any moat and they'll soon face competition too.
What about these vs. the routers like "Open"Router?
Cloudflare isn't solely a CDN anymore. CDN and DDOS-protection were the most logical "first" products to build based on their SDN ( Software Defined Networking).
A cloud is the next thing and there's a lot of money involved with the cloud. I see them as the only real competitor/challenger to Azure, AWS, GCE, ... because they aren't bound to regions ( less DevOps)
For example, what you might not know about Durable Objects => https://boristane.com/blog/what-are-cloudflare-durable-objec...
(https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-PwA!,f_auto,q_auto:...)
Revenue:
$ 85 million (2016)
$ 287 million (2019) IPO year
$ 1,670 million (2024)
$ 2,154 million (2025)
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NET/cloudflare/rev...
That's not a crazy valuation multiple considering their growth.
Palentir is a body shop. Cloudflare is infrastructure/cloud. Very big difference ( at least to me)
Stock ( Cloudflare - https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NET/holders/ ): 90.87% % of Shares Held by Institutions
Stock ( Palantir - https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PLTR/holders/): 60.09% % of Shares Held by Institutions
Defense against threats is a pretty strong centralization incentive in different kinds of networks - social, biological.
I could imagine that a lot of people are investing based on similar scenarios in their minds.
This was always their architecture, if you watched closely.
My predication 5 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26821438
> And cloudflare is self hosting it on more edge locations ( i think they could even join the big 3 soon)
From what I know they were the most used inference provider by developers a few years ago, but since the Together AI and Fireworks only grew while Replicate seems to have stayed quiet. It’s a highly competitive low-margin business, so volume is critical and if you’re losing volume then you’re doomed.
Given the price was not announced, it seems investors decided to exit via acquisition instead of trying to raise a multi hundred million round consistent with a multi billion dollar valuation and a high level of ambition that investors are shooting for in this space.
If the amount was high, they'd be be bragging about it. Given that they aren't, it might be on the lower end of the 2023 valuation for the then 40M round.
Just speculating here; I don't have any more information. Basing this on my understanding of how this stuff works. This might actually be the opening round for a few more such acquisitions of the somewhat risky investments of a few years ago of companies that are probably not going to turn into trillion $ unicorns. There are lots of pretty well funded startups in this space converting investment capital into cloud GPU cost. I think some level of consolidation is overdue and might take away some building concern about over exposure in the market. Big banks and investors might be getting nervous.
Uh huh
simonw•1h ago
I think this is Cloudflare's most notable acquisition yet? From Wikipedia it looks like they've previously mainly acquired smaller cybersecurity firms like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_1_Security
echelon•57m ago
mritchie712•12m ago
If they raised $500m... then yes, the wouldn't have done so well.
michaelbuckbee•39m ago
tracker1•30m ago
Definitely exciting to see.
ramimac•2m ago
* BastionZero
* Kivera
* Baselime
* PartyKit
* Area 1
* Vectrix
* Zaraz
* Linc
* S2 Systems Corporation
* Neumob
* Eager
* CryptoSeal
* StopTheHacker