CloudFlare, Inc. was awarded the prize for the most innovative company at this year's prestigious TechCrunch Disrupt conference. The conference was judged by thought leaders in Silicon Valley including Marissa Mayer (Google), Ron Conway (SV Angel), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Jason Goldman (Twitter), and Kevin Rose (Digg).
"The whole CloudFlare team is proud of having been selected the most innovative company from among an amazing field," said CloudFlare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince. "We are excited to be solving an important problem in a way that is accessible, affordable, and easy for anyone with a website."
CloudFlare's service brings the performance and security tools previously reserved for the Internet giants to the rest of the web. After a five minute signup, websites on the CloudFlare network see an average 30% improvement in page load times, 60% decrease in bandwidth usage, and 65% decrease in server load. CloudFlare's core service is free and does not require adding hardware, installing software, or changing a website's code. Additional services, such as SSL, realtime reports, and advanced security are available beginning at $20/month.
"Since launching on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt we have been averaging more than 2 new websites signing up per minute," said Michelle Zatlyn, CloudFlare co-founder and head of user experience. "Typically, these websites have about 5,000 unique visitors a month which means that, every minute, CloudFlare is making the web faster and safer for another 10,000 web surfers."
CloudFlare's founding team hails from Project Honey Pot, the largest open source community tracking online fraud and abuse. CloudFlare was selected from over 1,000 promising startups that applied to launch on-stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. CloudFlare is based in Palo Alto, California and backed by leading security and networking investors from Venrock and Pelion Venture Partners.
