Workers Launchpad Cohort #2: 25 Startups Join the Program
Cloudflare's Workers Launchpad Funding Program, launched in late 2022 with a $2 billion commitment, was created to support the more than one million developers building on Cloudflare's Developer Platform. Startups using the platform have leveraged Cloudflare to ship faster, scale efficiently, and accelerate growth, and the program's second cohort brings another 25 companies into the fold.
What Cohort #1 Accomplished
The inaugural cohort of 25 startups from around the world recently wrapped up with a Demo Day. Participants benefited from weekly Office Hours with Cloudflare Solutions Architects for technical guidance, plus the Founders Bootcamp, where founders engaged with Cloudflare leadership, previewed upcoming products with Developer Platform product managers, and received advice on topics such as building sales teams and pricing strategy.
Several Cohort #1 companies made notable progress during the program:
- Authdog streamlined identity and access management, migrating to Cloudflare Workers for a more frictionless customer experience, and documented their journey in a Built With Workers case study.
- Drivly, which builds automotive commerce APIs, made its public launch at Demo Day. The company is built entirely on Cloudflare, using Workers, Queues, PubSub, and Durable Objects.
- Flethy focuses on simplifying API integrations, citing Workers' nearly instant cold starts as a key advantage.
- GPUX launched version 2 of its serverless GPU platform at Demo Day, leveraging R2 and Workers with no egress charge.
- Grafbase celebrated its public launch and seven new features during its April 2023 Launch Week, building on Workers for Platforms among other Cloudflare products.
- Patr was recognized as a Product of the Day on Product Hunt for its scalable and secure digital infrastructure offering.
- Targum, an AI-powered video translation tool, launched to customers and passed $100K MRR within a month, using Cloudflare Stream to compete with YouTube's scale as a one-person startup.
- Karambit.ai, focused on software supply chain security, received a grant from the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation to scale commercial growth.
- Ninetailed launched integrations with Contentstack, Zapier, and other tools for API-first personalization.
- QRYN added integrations with Cloudflare Log Push, Grafana, and others for its polyglot monitoring and edge observability platform.
- Quest.ai expanded its frontend code-generation platform with animations, CSS grid, MUI & Chakra UI support, NextJS support, breakpoints, and nested components.
- Max, whose founders cited Workers' edge compute power, noted that the platform provides them with a global network to route data to customer deployments at infinite scale.
- Touchless joined the RudderStack Solutions Partner Program and uses Workers to enhance existing website platforms, achieving fivefold improvements in conversion with little to no code.
- Rollup ID debuted publicly, offering authentication and authorization features through Durable Objects, D1, R2, and other Cloudflare tools.
Introducing Cohort #2
Applications for Cohort #2 came from startups in nearly 50 countries, with a significant number of AI and AI-related companies addressing needs across development, security, and sales. Other themes included developer tooling improvements, collaboration platforms, new social and gaming experiences, and diverse problems in ecommerce, consumer, and real estate markets.
"While these applicants are tackling a diverse set of real-world problems," the announcement explains, "the common thread is that they chose to leverage Cloudflare's developer platform to build more secure, scalable, and feature-rich products faster than they otherwise could."
The selected companies are building across categories including AI-powered developer tools, security analytics, unstructured data processing, code review and deployment platforms, gaming infrastructure, ecommerce personalization, and no-code solution builders, as described in the company statements:
| 42able.ai | Making AI available and accessible to all. |
| ai.moda | Automate delegating tasks to both your bots and human workers with an MTurk compatible API. |
| Arrive GG | Real-time CDN for gamers. |
| Astro | All-in-one web framework designed for speed. Pull your content from anywhere and deploy everywhere, all powered by your favorite UI components and libraries. |
| Azule | Azule delivers AI agents that interact with your customers. |
| Brevity | Build better software, visually. |
| Buildless | Buildless is a global build cache, like Cloudflare for compiled code; we cache artifacts and make them available over the internet to exponentially accelerate developer velocity. |
| ChainFuse | no-code platform to build multi-model AI for your business. |
| ChatORG | Collaborative ChatGPT for your team. |
| Clerk | Clerk, the drop-in authentication and user management solution for React. |
| contribute.design | OpenSource Software & Design collaboration made easy. |
| Drifting in Space | Drifting in Space builds software that enables developers to use WebSockets to create real-time applications. |
| Eclipse AI | Prevent churn with generative AI. |
| Embley | Marketplace automation platform enabling businesses to scale better and faster. |
| Fudge | Fudge makes websites faster. |
| Mixer | Real world social on a generative AI stack. |
| Monosnap | Monosnap is a secure productivity SaaS with B2B PLG strategy, complementing existing workflows. |
| Nefeli Networks | Unified and declarative cloud network management. |
| Smplrspace | The digital floor plan platform. |
| Speech Labs | AI assistant helping with everyday tasks. |
| TestApp.io | Mobile app testing made easy. |
| Tigris Data | Serverless NoSQL database and search platform to help developers quickly and easily build any application. |
| tldraw | tldraw is building an infinite canvas for developers. |
| Vantyr | The programmatic authorization layer for SaaS. |
| WunderGraph | WunderGraph: The Backend for Frontend framework. |
What's Next
Cloudflare will work with Cohort #2 companies over the coming months as they build on the platform. Developers can stay informed about Launchpad updates through @CloudflareDev on Twitter or via the Cloudflare Developer Discord community. Applications for Cohort #3 will open in early fall.
Notably, Cloudflare does not provide funding directly or make funding decisions, and there is no guarantee that a particular company will receive funding through the program. All funding decisions are made by participating venture capital firms; Cloudflare is not a registered broker-dealer, investment adviser, or similar intermediary.
