Cloudflare acquires Deno to overhaul its Workers platform

Cloudflare announced Friday that it is acquiring Deno, the startup behind the programming runtime of the same name. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Kenton Varda, principal engineer for Cloudflare Workers, said Cloudflare will use the acquisition to improve its Workers programming model. Workers is Cloudflare’s platform for building and running software directly on its global network of edge servers, letting customers deploy code close to end users instead of a single centralized data center.

Deno was co-founded by Bert Belder and Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js. The startup recently launched celld, an open source implementation of Workers — a move Varda said delighted the Cloudflare team. Varda also pushed back on what he described as a popular theory that Cloudflare built Workers to work differently from other cloud platforms in order to create lock-in (making it harder for customers to switch providers). Instead, he argued, staying open source and giving developers an escape hatch is good business.

Dahl, for his part, wrote that his team is “joining Cloudflare to make the Workers programming model a mainstream way to build servers.”

Deno had raised a total of $26 million, including a Series A round led by Sequoia.

Why it matters

The acquisition suggests Cloudflare sees developer tooling, not just raw infrastructure, as central to keeping programmers on its platform. Whether Cloudflare preserves Deno’s open-source commitments — including projects like celld — will test if Varda’s “escape hatch” philosophy holds once a major vendor is in charge.