☁️ Cloudflare, Inc. — Key Facts
| Stock Listing | NYSE: NET |
| Co-Founders | Matthew Prince (CEO) & Michelle Zatlyn (President/COO) & Lee Holloway |
| Founded | 2009, San Francisco, California |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, USA |
| IPO | September 2019 (NYSE: NET) |
| Revenue (FY2023) | ~$1.6 billion |
| Services | CDN, DDoS protection, DNS, Zero Trust security, AI Gateway |
| Network | 300+ cities in 100+ countries (largest global CDN by network size) |
Cloudflare, Inc. is a publicly traded internet infrastructure and security company (NYSE: NET) co-founded by Matthew Prince (CEO) and Michelle Zatlyn (President and COO). As a public company, Cloudflare’s largest shareholders are institutional investors including Vanguard and BlackRock, but the co-founders retain significant stakes and voting influence. Cloudflare is one of the world’s most critical internet infrastructure providers, with its network handling approximately 20% of all web traffic globally.
Who Is the Owner of Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a publicly traded company (NYSE: NET) with broadly distributed institutional ownership. However, the co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn retain significant equity stakes and exercise influence through their executive roles. Prince serves as CEO; Zatlyn as President and COO (and is one of the few female co-founders of a multi-billion-dollar public tech company). A third co-founder, Lee Holloway, was a technical genius who built much of Cloudflare’s early infrastructure but stepped back from the company due to a rare neurological condition (frontotemporal dementia). His story was movingly chronicled in a 2022 WIRED profile. Cloudflare went public in September 2019 at $15/share.
What Cloudflare Does
Cloudflare provides internet infrastructure that sits between websites/applications and the users accessing them. Its core services include Content Delivery Network (CDN) — caching and delivering website content from servers close to users for faster load times; DDoS protection — blocking distributed denial-of-service attacks that try to overwhelm websites with traffic; DNS services (including the public 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver, one of the world’s fastest); and Zero Trust security for corporate networks. Cloudflare has expanded into AI-related services, including AI Gateway for businesses using large language models.
Cloudflare’s Role in Internet Freedom
Cloudflare’s enormous network coverage has made it a significant player in debates about internet freedom, content moderation, and the power of infrastructure companies. In 2019, Cloudflare terminated services to 8chan following mass shootings linked to content on that platform — a decision CEO Matthew Prince described as making him “uncomfortable” but necessary. Cloudflare’s ability to effectively take websites offline by denying infrastructure has raised serious questions about the appropriate role of infrastructure companies as de facto content moderators — a power historically wielded only by regulators and governments.
