Cloudflare acquires Deno to improve its Workers programming model

Cloudflare announced Friday that it is acquiring Deno, the startup behind the programming runtime of the same name. The financial terms were not disclosed.

Cloudflare principal engineer Kenton Varda said the company plans to use the acquisition to improve its Workers programming model and platform, which lets customers build and run software on Cloudflare’s network.

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. Varda said the project delighted the Cloudflare team.

Varda also pushed back on the idea that Cloudflare made Workers work differently from other cloud platforms to create vendor lock-in. He said the company believes open source and giving people an escape hatch is good business. Dahl wrote that his team is joining Cloudflare to make the Workers programming model a mainstream way to build servers.

Deno had raised a total of $26 million, including a Series A round led by Sequoia.