According to chief executive officer and co-founder Matthew Prince, website security provider CloudFlare received $50 million Series C funding in December of 2012. Prince said Union Square Ventures joined the startup's existing investors by injecting the massive funding into the company.
CloudFlare, as defined by its profile on Crunchbase, is a service that provides website owners protection from online threats, optimization of its content across various devices, and increases its page load time speed. Since launching in 2009, CloudFlare has received around $72.1 million in total funding, which included a $2.05 million Series A that was led by Pelion Venture Partners and Venrock, and a $20 million Series B from New Enterprise Associates and the startup's existing investors.
TechCrunch said that during the Series C funding round, CloudFlare received a series of term sheets with valuations of up to $1.2 billion. The startup in the end chose to go with Union Square Ventures, which was considered lower than the other offers. The report said Brad Burnham was the key in the selection of Union Square as CloudFlare's newest backer.
The report explained that Burnham was on the committee on Net Neutrality with the FCC together with CloudFlare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn. Burnham's capabilities to assist CloudFlare's Net Neutrality-related obstacles was the deciding factor to its selection as the startup's preferred investor.
Despite Burnham being absent as a board member, the report said he will be providing advice further back.
TechCrunch asked Prince why it revealed all this information now. He said, "The ethos in the Valley is to pump your first and pound your chest when you raise money, but that's not our ethos. Oftentimes, you raise money on promises of what you're going to do, not what you've done. We wanted to do it differently." TechCrunch deduced that CloudFlare might have a big plan in the works, perhaps an initial public offering in the future.
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