According to a Markets and Markets report, the global Cloud Security Market is expected to grow from $4.09 billion in 2017 to $12.73 billion by 2022 at a CAGR of more than 25%. Billion Dollar Unicorn club member Cloudflare is a leading provider of cloud-based security solutions.

Cloudflare’s Offerings

San Francisco-based CloudFflare was founded by Harvard students Michelle Zatlyn and Matthew Prince with their friend Lee Holloway in 2009. The idea behind Cloudflare came to Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway when they set out to figure out where email spam came from. To search for the answer, the duo worked on Project Honey Pot, a system that allowed anyone with a website to track how spammers harvested email addresses.

By 2009, Matthew had enrolled for his MBA from the Harvard Business School where he met Michelle who helped recognize the opportunity to build a service that would not only track Internet threats, but also help in stopping them. While Matthew and Michelle worked out the business plan, Lee began to build a first prototype. Soon, Cloudflare was born.

Cloudflare helps users access a more secure internet, while ensuring that users did not suffer from latency. By building a layer of caching for static resources, Cloudflare was taking spam away from its users’ sites to not only deliver security, but also improve performance.

Cloudflare’s Enterprise Focus

Since being founded, Cloudflare has been expanding its target market. While traditionally focused on protecting and providing acceleration for web applications for small businesses, the company is now targeting enterprises. As part of the focus, it launched Spectrum, a solution targeted at mainframe applications, IoT, and legacy email. It protects and provides performance acceleration for traffic that runs on the Transmission Control Protocol or User Datagram Protocol, thus allowing organizations to bring in cloud-based security and protection.

Earlier this year, Cloudflare entered into an agreement with IBM to provide a new set of cyber security offerings to its cloud computing customers. The tie up will allow IBM to outsource IT security functions while allowing Cloudflare to secure IBM’s network of customers through a reseller agreement. Cloudflare’s service will be branded under IBM Cloud Internet Services. Cloudflare has entered into similar arrangements with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

According to Datanyze, Cloudflare is ranked third among the 74 content delivery network players it analyzed. With an estimated 11% share, it is still significantly short of Amazon’s 47% share.

Cloudflare’s Financials

Cloudflare operates on a freemium model. It is privately held and does not disclose its detailed financials. Analysts estimate that its revenues are more than $100 million annually. It has raised $182 million in funding from investors including Greenspring Associates, New Enterprise Associates, Pelion Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, Venrock, Baidu, Fidelity Management, Qualcomm Ventures, Microsoft, and Google Capital. Its last round of funding was held in September 2015 when it raised $110 million at a $3.2 billion valuation.

Cloudflare boasts of being able to deliver a faster and safer internet. As users, I would like to know how has your experience been with Cloudflare?