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Report: Cloudflare preparing to go public in 2019
Content delivery network provider Cloudflare Inc. is preparing for an initial public offering, according to an unconfirmed report.
Reuters, quoting “people familiar with the matter,” claimed that the popular CDN provider is looking at going public in the first half of the year on a $3.5 billion valuation. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is said to have been tapped to run the IPO but the date has not yet been finalized.
Cloudflare Chief Executive Officer Matthew Prince seemingly denied the report, saying on Twitter that “it’s a strange transition from early in a startup’s life where you beg for the media to pay attention to you to later when they start making up things about you out of whole cloth.”
Founded in 2009, Cloudflare offers a range of cloud services to improve services for websites. Best known for its CDN, the company also offers video delivery, denial-of-service protection, domain registration, security, DNS services and more.
As one of if not the largest independent providers of CDN services, Cloudflare counts a number of big rivals, such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC and Akamai Technologies Inc. But it has worked with large tech firms in the past, including a partnership with Google and Microsoft Corp. in September to reduce the cost of network resources in the public cloud.
Although Prince has seemingly denied the report, going public next year makes sense for Cloudflare, and it’s not the first time it an IPO has been mentioned for it either.
Cloudflare is a venture capital-backed company and a relatively older one at that, with 2019 marking its 10th year in business. VCs don’t invest out of the goodness of their hearts, and the only two ways to achieve a profit on their investments is to have a startup be acquired or go public.
If it does decide to go public next year, Cloudflare will do so alongside a growing number of companies, Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. among them. Cloudflare has raised $182.1 million from companies including Fidelity, Alphabet Inc., Microsoft, Baidu Inc. and Qualcomm Inc.
Image: Cloudflare
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