San Francisco, Calif. — CloudFlare has raised $20 million in a new round of investment funding led by New Enterprise Associates. Founded in 2009, the content delivery network launched in October 2010. It now provides CDN-based protection to company websites, some of which reach 7 billion page views a month, according to VentureBeat.
CloudFlare provides what is basically a cloud-based firewall, protecting sites from threats. It also improves website performance, because eliminating threats and blocking things like undesirable bots and crawlers frees up bandwidth and server resources.
It won the Harvard Business School 2009 Business Plan Content, but CloudFlare gained a big publicity bump when the infamous hacker group LulzSec praised the startup in June, at the height of public interest in LulzSec’s attacks on Sony Computer Entertainment, PBS and other high-profile targets.
CloudFlare will use the Series B round funding to advance infrastructure projects and increase staffing. The company previously raised $2.05 million in a Series A funding from Venrock and Pelion Venture Partners.
“Every day thousands of websites sign up for CloudFlare and we’ve done a lot on modest resources,” CloudFlare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince told VentureBeat. “We’ve now built a foundation that’s helping us scale up and look forward to helping even bigger clients.”
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