Cloudflare acquires Deno to improve its Workers programming model

Cloudflare announced Friday that it’s acquiring Deno, the startup behind the programming runtime of the same name.

According to Cloudflare’s Kenton Varda, Cloudflare will use this acquisition to improve its Workers programming model and platform, which allows customers to build and run software on Cloudflare’s network. (Varda is principal engineer for Cloudflare Workers.)

Deno — which was co-founded by Bert Belder and Node.js creator Ryan Dahl — recently launched celld, an open source implementation of Workers, which Varda wrote “delighted” the Cloudflare team. Varda argued that contrary to “a popular theory” that the company “made Cloudflare Workers work differently from other cloud platforms in order to create ‘lock-in,’” the company believes “being open source and giving people an escape hatch is good business.”

Dahl, meanwhile, wrote that his team is “joining Cloudflare to make the Workers programming model a mainstream way to build servers.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Deno had raised a total of $26 million, including a Series A led by Sequoia.