Cloudflare final week announced a $1.25 billion funding program for startups that construct on its software program, Cloudflare Employees. However this isn’t a company enterprise fund and that sum shouldn’t be firm cash.
Somewhat, it’s an initiative through which the cloud infrastructure firm curates a bunch of its startup prospects and presents them to enterprise capitalists, every of which dedicated $50 million to again firms constructing on Cloudflare Employees. The checklist of 26 enterprise funds consists of massive gamers like NEA and Boldstart and smaller corporations like Pear VC. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince informed me that quantity has continued to develop for the reason that venture was introduced in September.
The rationale that is fascinating is that whereas public firms have been drastically growing their presence in startup funding lately, it’s largely been via considered one of two playbooks: Firms had been both setting apart a sleeve of capital on their stability sheet to again startups in adjoining or complementary sectors to their very own, or they had been launching an accelerator program.
This technique from Cloudflare feels recent. And if profitable, it might show to be a fairly sensible wager. This system basically helps funnel cash to its prospects, thus securing their want for the platform, whereas additionally attracting startups to contemplate constructing on Cloudflare over different platforms — with out Cloudflare having to spend something. It’s value noting firms getting into this program, no matter whether or not they get pitched to VCs, do get a number of software program options for a yr without cost.
However will an organization like Cloudflare be matchmaker? Prince appears to suppose so — he informed me that the thought for this system got here from the corporate’s conversations with enterprise capitalists.
