Cloudflare stock climbed Friday after the company reported first-quarter earnings that met views while revenue topped Wall Street targets. The internet infrastructure firm's revenue guidance for the current quarter met expectations.
The company reported earnings after the market close on Thursday. For the period that ended March 30, Cloudflare earnings were 16 cents a share, the same as a year earlier. Revenue climbed 27% to $479.1 million, the San Francisco-based company said.
Analysts predicted profit of 16 cents a share and revenue of $469.3 million.
"In Q1, we landed the largest contract in Cloudflare's history, a more than $100 million deal driven by our Workers developer platform, and signed the longest-term SASE (software as a service) contract to date," said Chief Executive Matthew Prince, in a news release.
On the stock market today, Cloudflare gained more than 9% to 136.21 in early trading.
Cloudflare Stock: New AI Standard
For the current quarter ending in June, Cloudflare projected revenue of $500.5 million at the midpoint of guidance vs. estimates of $500.4 million. Also, the company maintained its 2025 revenue growth target of 25%.
Started in 2009, Cloudflare works to speed up and provide security for web applications routed through its intelligent global network.
Further, Cloudflare has ties to generative artificial intelligence leader OpenAI. Cloudflare provides secure links to cloud services when consumers sign up to use ChatGPT. Also, Cloudflare has developed a new AI industry standard with Anthropic, noted William Blair analyst Jonathan Ho in a report.
"We highlight Cloudflare's success with its model context protocol (MCP) developed in partnership with Anthropic to serve as a critical infrastructure layer to connect AI systems to external applications," Ho said. "We believe Cloudflare could leverage the MCP to become even more embedded in the infrastructure layer associated with the emerging AI stack beyond its Cloudflare Workers development pipeline, cybersecurity, and edge compute capabilities."
Cloudflare Stock Technical Ratings
Heading into the Cloudflare earnings report, the stock had advanced 16% in 2025. But shares have retreated from their 52-week high of 177.37 set on Feb. 14.
Top management has been undergoing changes.
In 2024, Cloudflare appointed Mark Anderson as president of revenue. Most recently the chief executive of privately held Alteryx, Anderson earlier served as president of cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks. Also, Cloudflare named Stephanie Cohen, formerly a Goldman Sachs executive, as its first-ever chief strategy officer.
Then Cloudflare hired a former top ServiceNow executive, Chirantan "C.J." Desai, as president of product and engineering.
"We believe there are early signs of its beefed up go-to-market bench (Anderson, Desai) bearing fruit," said TD Cowen analyst Shaul Eyal in a report.
RBC Capital analyst Matthew Hedberg holds a similar view.
"The go-to-market changes and focus up market continue to pay dividends as evidenced by a number of
highlighted $5 million-plus deals," he said.
In addition, Cloudflare stock owns a Composite Rating of 94 out of a best-possible 99, according to IBD Stock Checkup.
Follow Reinhardt Krause on X, formerly Twitter, @reinhardtk_tech for updates on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and cloud computing.
