Cloudflare eyes $3.5 billion valuation in upcoming IPO

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Cloudflare cofounders, CEO Matthew Prince and COO Michelle Zatlyn

• San Francisco security startup Cloudflare, on Tuesday set a price range for its IPO of $10 to $12 per share.
• At the high point, the company could be valued at $3.5 billion.
• Cloudflare is expected to start trading later this month on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker "NET".

Cloudflare, a security startup that protects websites from attacks and helps pages load quickly, set a price range for its upcoming IPO, which could value the San Francisco company as high as $3.5 billion.

In a filing Tuesday, the company said it plans to price its IPO at $10 to $12 per share. At the high point, Cloudflare would raise $483 million. The company is expected to start trading later this month on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "NET".

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Since its founding in 2009, Cloudflare has raised more than $400 million in private capital. Its biggest shareholders include its Series A backers Venrock and Pelion Ventures, as well as its Series B lead, New Enterprise Associates.

Read more: Cloudflare's CEO protected Nazis and sex workers on principle - now the internet's most ethical CEO will have to answer to Wall Street

But its biggest shareholder of all is Fidelity, which led a $150 million funding round in March 2019.

In 2014, the company raised $100 million from Google's Capital G, Microsoft,Baidu and Qualcomm.

Cloudflare has made headlines over the past few years for its ardent protection of contentious organizations, which would fall victim to denial-of-service-attacks from adversaries without Cloudflare's services.

More recently though, the company has changed its tune. Cloudflare founder and CEO Matthew Prince publicly stopped working with two different organizations over the past two years, including the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer in 2017, and again this August when Cloudflare stopped working with the forum 8chan, which was tied to three mass shootings this year.