CloudFlare Raises $110M from Google, Microsoft, Baidu, Others

logo-WHIR

This article originally appeared at The WHIR

CloudFlare has raised $110 million in equity capital in a funding round led by Fidelity Management and Research Company, with strategic participation from Google Capital, Microsoft, Baidu, and Qualcomm, through its venture investment arm Qualcomm Ventures. With the latest investment, CloudFlare has raised $182 million total in equity funding.

According to the company’s announcement on Tuesday, it will use the new funding to acquire customers, grow its product capabilities, and rollout rapid expansion into new international markets. CloudFlare recently expanded in China and Australia, and plans to expand its global network at the pace of one new data center location per week.

CloudFlare has more than four million customers worldwide, and has a presence in more than 30 countries. The funding round comes as CloudFlare readies its San Francisco headquarters for its first ever Internet Summit on Thursday.

“There’s an inevitability around our business,” Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare said. “Traditional on-premise solutions such as firewalls, load balancers, and DDoS mitigation appliances are becoming obsolete as organizations distribute their applications across geographies and cloud environments. CloudFlare offers these edge functions as a service without any additional hardware or software, irrespective of where the applications reside.”

With the growth of mobile Internet traffic, CloudFlare will continue to invest in product ranges to increase the performance and security of mobile applications.

As part of Microsoft’s strategic participation, CloudFlare’s capabilities will be “seamlessly” extended to the Azure ecosystem, according to Microsoft CVP of business development Bob Kelly.

Scott Sandell, managing general partner at New Enterprise Associates said: “We view CloudFlare as a category-defining company that is fundamentally changing the way enterprises deploy applications on the Internet. The broad strategic participation in the round reflects the degree to which this proposition has entered the mainstream, and is recognized by forward-thinking companies as a massive opportunity.”

In 2013, CloudFlare quietly raised a $50 million Series C funding round. In 2011, the company raised $20 million led by New Enterprise Associates.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/cloudflare-raises-110-million-gains-strategic-partners-for-rapid-expansion-plan