Look at Cloudflare if you already use it for security or a CDN and want to run AI inference, route model calls or store embeddings on the same network. Matthew Prince is the CEO. It does not train large language models, so you pick the model yourself from a catalog.
Cloudflare, founded in 2009 and based in San Francisco, is a public connectivity cloud company (NYSE: NET) that serves traffic from 335 cities in over 125 countries. Its AI line covers Workers AI inference, AI Gateway, Vectorize and the open-weight Clef decision models released in October 2026 under Apache 2.0.
Founded: 2009 · HQ: San Francisco, CA, USA · Team: 5000+ · CEO: Matthew Prince · Funding: Public (NYSE: NET)
About Cloudflare
Cloudflare, Inc. was incorporated in Delaware in July 2009 and has its principal offices at 101 Townsend Street in San Francisco. Matthew Prince, a co-founder, has been chief executive since July 2009. Michelle Zatlyn, also a co-founder, led user experience, became chief operating officer in 2016 and president in 2020. Both now serve as co-chairs of the board. Prince holds degrees from Trinity College, the University of Chicago Law School and Harvard Business School, and co-founded Unspam Technologies before Cloudflare. The company is listed on the NYSE under the ticker NET.
The core business is network security and performance. Cloudflare describes itself as a connectivity cloud and sells DDoS protection, a web application firewall, a CDN, DNS, load balancing and the Cloudflare One zero trust suite. Its own about page says the network answers 115 million HTTP requests per second on average and serves data from 335 cities in over 125 countries. Most customers first meet the company through one of those products, which matters for the AI line because the same account, network and billing carry over.
The AI products sit inside the developer platform. Workers AI runs machine learning models on serverless GPUs across the network. Vectorize stores and queries embeddings. AI Gateway adds observability, caching, security and routing to AI applications, and its documentation lists OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini and Replicate among the providers it works with. In December 2025 it also bought Replicate, a platform for running hosted models. Workers AI is billed at $0.011 per 1,000 Neurons, with 10,000 Neurons per day free, according to the Cloudflare documentation. Cloudflare also publishes Cloudflare OS, an open-source workspace for agents and apps that runs on Workers and uses AI Gateway to route model calls.
In October 2026 the company moved into model releases. On October 1 it released Clef, a 27B model, and Clef-flash as open weights, and about a week later added Clef-omni, which takes audio and video alongside text and images. These are decision models rather than chat models: they score each allowed answer to a question instead of writing text, a format that TypeSafe AI introduced with Jev. The Hugging Face card for Clef lists an Apache-2.0 license and says it was post-trained from Qwen3.8-27B, a base model from Alibaba Cloud, and the weights are hosted on Hugging Face. Cloudflare publishes benchmark tables in which Clef models lead Jev on several tests, but these are the vendor's own figures and Jev still scores higher on others, such as When2Call.
The financial record is public. Revenue for 2025 was $2,167.9 million, up 30% from $1,669.6 million in 2024, and Q2 2026 revenue was $696.1 million, up 36% year over year. In that quarter the company reported a GAAP loss from operations of $205.7 million, which included $150.7 million of restructuring and other charges, against non-GAAP operating income of $96.1 million. It held $4,162.8 million in cash and securities on June 30, 2026, and guided to full-year 2026 revenue of $2,864.0 to $2,870.0 million. The Replicate deal closed on December 1, 2025 at $57.4 million in total purchase cash consideration.
Cloudflare reported 5,156 full-time employees on December 31, 2025, up from 4,263 a year earlier and 3,682 the year before that, with 2,452 of them outside the United States. Its Q2 2026 release also refers to a plan to move to an agentic AI-first operating model that includes a reduction of the current workforce, though the text does not give a headcount figure. The board includes Scott Sandell of New Enterprise Associates as lead independent director, Mark Hawkins, former chief financial officer of Salesforce, Stacey Cunningham, former president of the NYSE, and John Graham-Cumming, who was chief technology officer until March 2025.
Cloudflare's pitch against the hyperscalers is placement and control: inference near users, and one gateway across many model providers. It competes for AI workloads with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, which own far larger GPU fleets. Inference specialists such as Together AI, Fireworks AI, Groq and Modal compete on speed and price, OpenRouter overlaps with AI Gateway as one door to many providers, and LanceDB is a comparable pick for vector storage. Its responsible AI page says Cloudflare does not train large language models and does not provide GPU access for training, so the models you run are third-party models under their own licenses, such as those from OpenAI or Anthropic through the gateway. That keeps customer data out of LLM training, by the company's account, but it also means Cloudflare has no frontier model of its own.
On compliance, the trust hub carries more than a dozen attestations and registrations, among them ISO 27001:2022, SOC 2 Type II, FedRAMP High and the German C5:2020 catalogue. For HIPAA it tells customers to ask the account team for the attestation. The company says it may train its security models on threat signals and samples of data crossing its systems, which is separate from customer-trained inference on Workers AI.
Mission
To help build a better Internet.
Products
- Workers AI (Serverless inference): https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/
- AI Gateway (AI observability and routing): https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-gateway/
- Vectorize (Vector database): https://developers.cloudflare.com/vectorize/
- Clef (Open-weight decision models): https://huggingface.co/Cloudflare/clef
- Cloudflare OS (Open-source agent workspace): https://os.cloudflare.app/
Compliance
ISO 27001:2022, ISO 27701, ISO 27018, ISO 27017, SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS 4.0, FedRAMP High, C5:2020, CSA STAR, GDPR
Links
Frequently Asked Questions
How much funding has Cloudflare raised?
Cloudflare is publicly traded on the NYSE under NET, so it reports revenue rather than raising private rounds. Its 2025 revenue of $2,167.9 million was up 30%, and growth reached 36% in the second quarter of 2026. In December 2025 it spent $57.4 million in total purchase cash consideration on the AI platform Replicate.
What products does Cloudflare make in 2026?
Cloudflare sells network security, a CDN and DNS, the Cloudflare One zero trust suite, and a developer platform with Workers. Its AI products are Workers AI, AI Gateway and Vectorize. Workers AI costs $0.011 per 1,000 Neurons after a free 10,000 Neurons per day. It also publishes the open-weight Clef models and the open-source Cloudflare OS.
How does Cloudflare handle data privacy and compliance?
Cloudflare publishes audit reports and certifications for security, privacy and government use on its trust hub, including a FedRAMP High authorization. For HIPAA it asks customers to contact their account team for the attestation. Its responsible AI page says customer prompts are not used for LLM training, because the company trains no LLMs itself.
Who are Cloudflare's main competitors?
For AI workloads the closest rivals are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. Cloudflare wins on putting inference near users and on one gateway across several model providers. It loses on scale of GPU capacity and on owning a frontier model, which it does not build. In decision models, Jev from TypeSafe AI is the direct rival to Clef.
How do you start using Cloudflare's AI products?
Create a Cloudflare account and open Workers AI in the dashboard, or call it from a Worker or the REST API. The Workers Free plan includes 10,000 Neurons per day, which covers a first test. To use the Clef models yourself, download the open weights from Hugging Face.