Cloudflare announced Friday that it is acquiring Deno, the startup behind the open source runtime of the same name. The company says it will use the deal to improve its Workers programming model and platform, which lets customers build and run software directly on Cloudflare's network.
Deno was co-founded by Bert Belder and Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Deno had previously raised $26 million in total, including a Series A round led by Sequoia, according to TechCrunch.
Why Cloudflare wants Deno
According to Kenton Varda, principal engineer for Cloudflare Workers, the team was particularly impressed by celld, an open source implementation of Workers that Deno recently launched. Varda wrote that it "delighted" the Cloudflare team, and framed the acquisition as part of a broader bet on openness.
Varda pushed back on what he called "a popular theory" that Cloudflare designed Workers differently from other cloud platforms in order to create lock-in. Instead, he argued that being open source and giving developers an escape hatch is good business.
For his part, Dahl wrote that his team is joining Cloudflare to make the Workers programming model a mainstream way to build servers.
- Cloudflare announced the acquisition on Friday.
- Deno was co-founded by Bert Belder and Node.js creator Ryan Dahl.
- Deno recently launched celld, an open source implementation of Workers.
- Deno had raised $26 million in total, including a Sequoia-led Series A.
