A San Francisco-based company is expanding its footprint in Austin.
Cloudflare, an internet security company, is actively hiring more than 170 people in Austin with positions ranging from engineers and designers to a recruiter and a product manager. According to the company’s Built In page, this hiring push will grow Cloudflare’s local footprint to nearly 530 people.
But the growth doesn’t stop there. According to the Austin Business Journal, Cloudflare signed a new 125,000-square-foot lease in Austin — reportedly the largest office lease since the start of the pandemic. Cloudflare did not respond to Built In requests for comment about this lease or the company’s local growth.
Cloudflare’s story begins back in 2004 when Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway developed a system to track how spammers gathered email addresses before eventually tracking internet threats. In 2009, Prince met Michelle Zatlyn who saw an opportunity to expand the system beyond tracking threats to stopping online threats as well. Prince, Holloway and Zatlyn officially launched Cloudflare in 2009 and closed a Series A round later that year.
Today, Cloudflare is a publicly traded company that claims businesses like Thomson Reuters, LendingTree and Shopify as customers. Its product offerings “protect and accelerate any internet application online without adding hardware, installing software or changing a line of code,” according to the company.
Cloudflare has raised $331.1 million to date, according to Crunchbase. In addition to Austin, the company has offices in San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Illinois and Washington, D.C., and several international offices in London, Singapore, Toronto, Sydney and other cities.
