Cloudflare last week announced a $1.25 billion funding program for startups that build on its software, Cloudflare Workers. But this isn’t a corporate venture fund and that sum is not company money.
Rather, it’s an initiative in which the cloud infrastructure company curates a group of its startup customers and presents them to venture capitalists, each of which committed $50 million to back companies building on Cloudflare Workers. The list of 26 venture funds includes big players like NEA and Boldstart and smaller firms like Pear VC. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told me that number has continued to grow since the project was announced in September.
The reason this is interesting is that while public companies have been drastically increasing their presence in startup funding in recent years, it’s largely been through on …
