CloudFlare today announced several key milestones, furthering its mission to help build a better Internet. After quietly raising a $50 million Series C funding round from Union Square Ventures and Greenspring Associates, with existing investors NEA, Pelion Venture Partners, and Venrock participating, the company has blown away expectations to become part of the critical infrastructure of the web.

'The web is about to turn 25 years old and it's beginning to show its age,' said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare. 'Whether you're building a traditional website, a complex online application, or the next great mobile app you need to be backed by a fast, secure network. CloudFlare has built that next generation network and is democratizing the resources that were previously available only to the Internet giants.'

CloudFlare has become the standard for Internet performance and security, today powering more than five percent of all web requests. In 2013, CloudFlare stopped over 50 billion attacks including the Internet's largest DDoS attack. This year, CloudFlare doubled its customer count to more than 1.5 million -- ranging from Fortune 100 companies and national governments to small businesses and mobile app startups. The customers contributed to a 450 percent increase in CloudFlare's year-over-year revenues.

'At Union Square Ventures we have always believed in the transformative power of the Internet. Until recently, we have naively believed that the Internet would always be there and always be available,' explained Brad Burnham, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures. 'We now know that the great strength of the Internet -- its openness -- also makes it vulnerable to malware, denial of service, and other forms of attack. We are thrilled to be working with CloudFlare to harness the collective power of the Internet to defend the network from these attacks. Importantly for us, CloudFlare's approach does this without sacrificing the values of openness and permissionless innovation that have made the Internet such an important engine of economic growth.'

'When NEA first invested in CloudFlare in 2011, I thought it was one of the most exciting companies I'd ever seen,' said Scott Sandell, General Partner at NEA. 'That conviction has only increased with the company's continued technological innovation and extraordinary growth. Matthew and his team have not only revolutionized network security and performance, they are in the process of helping reinventing the Internet itself. And from a business perspective, their growth rivals the trajectories of the best SaaS companies.'

With the capital infusion from its series C round that closed in December 2012, CloudFlare quadrupled its network capacity across 23 global data centers and established an engineering office in London. The company plans to continue its rapid network expansion in 2014 with new data center locations coming soon in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and China.

About CloudFlare
CloudFlare, Inc. (www.cloudflare.com / @cloudflare) makes sites twice as fast, protects them from attacks, ensures they are always online, and makes it simple to add web apps with a single click. CloudFlare supercharges websites regardless of size or platform with no need to add hardware, install software, or change a line of code. The CloudFlare community gets stronger as it grows; every new site makes the network smarter. Thanks to our awesome sauce technology, more than 1.5 billion people have experienced a faster, safer, better Internet. CloudFlare is based in San Francisco, California.