Cloudflare Acquires Deno to Strengthen Its Workers Platform
Financial terms were not disclosed, but Cloudflare says Deno’s open-source celld implementation of Workers “delighted” its team. Ryan Dahl’s group will help make Workers mainstream for server development; Deno had raised $26 million.
Cloudflare announced on Friday, October 10, 2026, that it is acquiring Deno, the startup behind the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime of the same name. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Cloudflare plans to use the acquisition to improve its Workers programming model and platform, which enables customers to build and run software on Cloudflare’s network. Kenton Varda, principal engineer for Cloudflare Workers, confirmed the deal and outlined its strategic direction.
Deno was co-founded by Bert Belder and Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js. The startup recently launched celld, an open source implementation of Workers, which Varda said “delighted” the Cloudflare team. Varda also pushed back on the notion that Cloudflare designed its Workers platform to create vendor lock-in, writing that the company believes “being open source and giving people an escape hatch is good business.”
Dahl framed the move from his team’s perspective, stating they are “joining Cloudflare to make the Workers programming model a mainstream way to build servers.”
Prior to the acquisition, Deno had raised a total of $26 million in funding, including a Series A round led by Sequoia.
The deal suggests Cloudflare is deepening its investment in the developer tools and runtime infrastructure underpinning its edge computing platform. By bringing Deno’s team in-house, the company may be positioning Workers as a more open and widely adopted standard for server-side development.