Cloudflare Chief Executive Matthew Prince tells people that simply put, the company makes the internet faster and protects it from the bad guys. One Wall Street analyst goes much further, calling Cloudflare the "Swiss Army knife" of the internet. What's clear is that with Cloudflare stock up some 72% in 2025, investors believe it's performing a darn good job.
The provider of cloud-based networking and cybersecurity services has come a long way from its 2009 founding and 2019 initial public offering. Aiming to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom, it's again morphing into a multifaceted company.
"AI is going to force the business model of the web to change," Prince said told Investor's Business Daily. "Cloudflare is in a unique position to power that future business model of the internet."
Roughly 20% of the internet uses Cloudflare services, the company says.
"What we do is we imagine the internet and we say, how can we make it more secure, how can we make it faster? How can we make it more reliable? How can we make it more efficient, meaning, cheaper. And then, how can we make it more private?" Prince added. "And I think that will continue to define our roadmap over the long term."
Project Honey Pot
A native of Utah, Prince attended Trinity College in Connecticut, then went to the University of Chicago Law school. After graduating there, he pursued an MBA at Harvard Business School. While serving as an adjunct law professor in 2004, Prince and Lee Holloway developed "Project Honey Pot" to track and deter email spammers.
Then at Harvard in 2009, Prince joined Michelle Zatlyn and Holloway in creating a service mitigating hacker attacks aimed at disrupting websites. The trio launched Cloudflare at a TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2010.
In 2014, Cloudflare took a giant step by giving away enterprise-grade cryptographic technology that secures the web.
"We started out with what seemed like a pretty simple idea, which is, 'How do you put a firewall on a cloud?'" Prince said. "I think the story of Cloudflare is we kind of get ourselves in a pickle over and over again, and then we use smart and clever engineering in order to solve problems. And then that often turns into products."
Early on, Cloudflare's competitors were Akamai Technologies and Fastly. But one of its chief rivals today is Amazon Web Services, the cloud arm of Amazon.com.
Cloudflare Stock: Swiss Army Knife
KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Jackson Ader said in a report: "Cloudflare has shown an uncanny ability to develop, launch, and market products across such a wide range of use-cases. Defining what type of company it even is has become challenging.
"Cloudflare began with an attempt to build a better internet in content delivery, but its rapid expansion into security, the developer ecosystem, database, storage, and compute means that it can more aptly be labeled as the network Swiss Army knife."
Top management has been undergoing changes recently as Cloudflare overhauled its go-to-market strategy. With roots in the small- and medium-size business market, Cloudflare is targeting large companies and bigger deals.
"For most of Cloudflare's history, we have been a product led growth company," Prince said. "We built great products. People would call us up, and then buy those products because they because they heard about it."
He added: "It's really been about a shift from a purely product led growth company, which was what we were for a long time, to realizing that we can sell much bigger deals. And in order to do that, we've got to build the relationships and really build a true enterprise sales team."
Prince says many iconic technology companies have morphed into multiproduct companies over time. He said Amazon originally developed huge computer server farms for peak online holiday sales, then jumped into the cloud computing business.
In Cloudflare's case, it built software developer tools for internal use, then sold them to customers. Cloudflare's Workers platform lets developers build and run applications securely close to users.
Workers Platform Boosts Cloudflare Stock Earnings
Among the biggest customers for the Workers platform have been AI and cryptocurrency companies. They develop cloud-based apps deployed over its network.
"I think that the pattern is that when new areas emerge and people are building new applications, whether that's crypto or AI or whatever comes tomorrow, and they get the chance to start with a blank sheet of paper, they are over-and-over again, choosing to use Cloudflare as their underlying cloud platform, because we've just built a better mousetrap," Prince said.
Cloudflare has been a big spender on research and development, trimming profits.
In the March quarter, Cloudflare posted earnings of 16 cents a share, the same as a year earlier. Revenue climbed 27% to $479.1 million, the San Francisco-based company said. The company maintained its 2025 revenue growth target of 25%.
On Wall Street, analysts say the company's multipronged artificial intelligence strategy seems to be jelling.
Many companies are in trials with autonomous, goal-driven "AI agents" that are deployed to perform tasks on the internet. AI agents also seek information at websites.
"Cloudflare is positioning itself as a universal 'Switzerland' supporting all platforms and all services in need of AI interactions between agents and platforms," TD Cowen analyst Shaul Eyal said in a report.
Internally, Prince noted that Cloudflare uses AI for its online customer service chatbots. Its finance department uses AI to predict when customers may pay late. And, its sales team uses AI for prospecting clients.
In addition, Cloudflare uses AI to predict threats and optimize traffic routing on its global network, which spans 350 cities.
"At some level, Cloudflare has always been an AI company," he said.
AI Gatekeeper For Internet?
Cloudflare recently has been targeting media publishers and content creators as new customers. The company is providing tools to restrict AI bots from accessing their websites without payment.
Prince says new AI-driven search tools threaten to lower publisher revenues by providing direct answers and summaries rather than links. That results in less traffic to media websites and advertising revenue. Cloudflare could emerge as one of the internet's gatekeepers as "AI agents" flood the web.
"I think there's a big opportunity around creating guardrails and toll booths," he said.
Other Cloudflare AI products target software developers. Prince has said the "killer app" for the Cloudflare Workers platform could be providing computing for AI workloads. Cloudflare has deployed Nvidia AI accelerators across its global network.
"We believe that a lot of AI inference is going to run on our network," he said. "A lot of inference is going to run on your phone. A lot of inference is going to run in your driverless car. But there will always be AI models that are too big or consume too much power in order to run locally, and in those cases, the next best place for those models to run is in the network itself."
In April, Cloudflare acquired AI startup Outerbase. It could be looking for more acquisitions. In June, Cloudflare raised $1.75 billion in a convertible debt offering.
With 2025's gain, Cloudflare stock has advanced 1,140% since its 2019 IPO when shares were priced at 15.
Cloudflare Stock: SASE A Growth Driver?
The company has set a target for garnering $5 billion in annual recurring revenue exiting 2028. While artificial intelligence is a long-term play, many Wall Street analysts expect near-term upside from cybersecurity services. Companies are expected to modernize networks with software-based security solutions.
Cloudflare has pushed into Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE, which offers a fast and cost-effective way of securing an organization's branch offices and remote workers. It's leveraging its global network.
"We see SASE as a natural growth extension of the business as it is low incremental cost to implement and is appealing to customers that have a global footprint," said William Blair analyst Jonathan Ho in an email. "Cloudflare isn't quite there yet in terms of competing with the big players feature-wise but is closing the gap over time."
Ho added: "With SASE they have an advantage over smaller startups and incumbents because of the large amounts of traffic they already carry — 20% of global internet traffic. Zscaler, for example, has built their own proprietary network but doesn't have as strong coverage and scalability outside of North America and Europe."
Follow Reinhardt Krause on X, formerly Twitter, @reinhardtk_tech for updates on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and cloud computing.
