Cloudflare has acquired Deno, the startup co-founded by Node.js creator Ryan Dahl and Bert Belder, in a deal announced Friday aimed at strengthening its Workers serverless platform. Terms were not disclosed; Deno had raised $26 million in total, including a Sequoia-led Series A.
The driver of the deal is Deno's "celld," an open-source implementation of the Workers model released in August. Cloudflare's Kenton Varda said the technology "delighted" the team, and the plan is to merge celld into workerd - Cloudflare's Workers runtime - to improve the self-hosting story for Workers and Durable Objects. Dahl and Belder will lead the merger, and Cloudflare framed openness as an anti-lock-in pitch.
The acquisition also marks the end of Deno's standalone products: the Deno runtime will receive fixes for roughly another year, and the Deno Deploy hosting service will wind down over about six months. The move deepens Cloudflare's developer-platform bet as edge compute competition with hyperscalers intensifies.
