Cloudflare

(NYSE: NET · $350.87 ▼ 2.8%) Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET) is a publicly traded connectivity cloud company that helps organizations make their employees, applications and networks faster and more secure while reducing complexity and cost. A connectivity cloud generally means one global network between users and the services they reach, where security, performance and application code run together rather than in separate appliances or data centers. The company serves data from 335 cities in over 125 countries, proxies roughly 20% of web traffic and handles an average of 102 million HTTP requests per second.

Its platform of cloud-native products and developer tools spans more than sixty services across SASE and Zero Trust security, application security and performance, and full-stack development with integrated compute and storage. Plans for websites bundle DDoS mitigation, a global CDN, SSL and a web application firewall, while the Workers developer platform bills only CPU time, not time spent waiting on slow APIs during agent workflows. Because these services share one global network, threat intelligence drawn from blocking billions of threats a day can inform protections across the platform, a common argument for unified networks over standalone security tools.

Customers range from large brands to entrepreneurs, small businesses, nonprofits, humanitarian groups and governments, including 45% of the Fortune 500, and free tiers let developers start without a credit card. Founded in San Francisco in 2009, Cloudflare began as an application to trace the source of email spam before growing into a service that protects websites from attacks while optimizing performance. It calls itself an engineering company at its core and operates 18 offices, including European and Asia-Pacific hubs, a footprint suited to infrastructure and customers spread worldwide.