San Francisco-based Cloudflare announced Thursday the first cohort of 25 companies that will participate in its Launchpad program, which connects startups that build applications on Cloudflare's platform with venture capitalists. Three of the startups are based in the Bay Area.
The program has grown to include 40 VC firms that have each earmarked $50 million to potentially fund startups that complete the program, bringing the total fund value up for grabs to $2 billion. Participating VCs include 8VC, Airtree, Alumni Ventures, B Capital Group, BGV, Chamaeleon, Conversion Capital and Counterpoint Global.
Cloudflare (NYSE: NET) will also provide program participants with a free enterprise subscription to its services. The company's services are used by 20% of websites around the world to protect them from being taken down by DDoS attacks and other malicious disruptions.
Two companies are based in San Francisco: Grafbase, a startup building a distributed storage solution on Cloudflare and Nostra, which is building a CRM for e-commerce sites. Narrative BI, which provides analytics and marketing insights based on advertising data, is based in Mountain View.
These companies all build on Cloudflare's Workers platform, which allows developers to scale their products without using servers.
"We see all these great companies who are building on our platform, and then are able to connect them to the VCs, who invest," said Alex Dyner, SVP of special projects at Cloudflare. "So we're not committing our own capital to the program, but we get all the benefits that a corporate venture program would get."
Dyner says the VCs involved in the program are not obligated to invest in the participating startups, but have agreed to hear their pitches and have funds earmarked to potentially invest.
This is Cloudflare's first cohort of startups, and the company expects to continue the program with one cohort every quarter.
