Cloudflare announced Friday that it is acquiring Deno, the open-source programming runtime startup co-founded by Bert Belder and Node.js creator Ryan Dahl. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Cloudflare plans to use the acquisition to improve its Workers platform, which lets customers build and run software on Cloudflare's edge network. Kenton Varda, principal engineer for Cloudflare Workers, said the acquisition will strengthen the Workers programming model.
Deno recently launched celld, an open-source implementation of Workers. Varda wrote that this move "delighted" the Cloudflare team and directly addressed concerns about vendor lock-in. He stated the company believes "being open source and giving people an escape hatch is good business," contradicting what he called "a popular theory" that Cloudflare designed Workers differently from other cloud platforms to create lock-in.
Ryan 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 dollars, including a Series A round led by Sequoia, before the acquisition.