[HN Gopher] Replicate is joining Cloudflare
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Replicate is joining Cloudflare
Author : bfirsh
Score : 251 points
Date : 2025-11-17 14:11 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (replicate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (replicate.com)
| simonw wrote:
| Congrats Ben and team!
|
| I think this is Cloudflare's most notable acquisition yet? From
| Wikipedia it looks like they've previously mainly acquired
| smaller cybersecurity firms like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_1_Security
| echelon wrote:
| I don't know that this was an acquisition in the sense that the
| Replicate investors and team made bank. I don't see a price
| tag, and the market for these "run model" infra companies is
| pretty crowded.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| replicate "only" raised $50m, so I'd wager the founders,
| investors and early employees did well here.
|
| If they raised $500m... then yes, the wouldn't have done so
| well.
| dagi3d wrote:
| for investors, it will highly depend on the valuation
| ($350m) and liquidation preferences. so, even if they
| "only" raised $50m, seeing almost or none return is
| plausible. this also includes employees who exercised their
| options. another story is for the founders
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| This feels the most like Cloudflare branching out to something
| closer to a traditional hosting model and further from their
| networking efforts (though things like workers and R2 certainly
| have blurred that line).
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'd love to work on Cloudflare's underlying email platform...
| from pretty early on, I've felt like the workers model could
| be great for handling relatively short lived tcp connections,
| not just web requests... in this way, all the other
| facilities CF offers such as R2 and D1 could be used with an
| email platform that could scale incredibly well. With this
| acquisition, it's another natural fit into such a platform
| for email spam filtering and classification.
|
| Definitely exciting to see.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Recently implemented it to only process emails where the
| sender is in the list of customers email and then extract
| info from email and do an api call.
|
| Really easy to do it on the edge. No hassle with POP3,
| IMAP, ... Easy to use a subdomain of my email domain
|
| Loc: ~40
| tracker1 wrote:
| Did a CF worker for an email group list which worked well
| enough... having each email address target have to
| approve themselves was about the only hiccup. Definitely
| nice options all around.
|
| Would be interested in seeing an Outlook/(o365/Exchange)
| alternative from Cloudflare with a bit more of a feature
| rich offering... or at least the ability to build
| something like that on CF.
| weitendorf wrote:
| If you (or others here) are truly interested in email+tcp
| proxying+workers-like-computing, then I have work to offer
| you in the build out of my company's network/computing
| platform.
|
| This is something that you can or could already do with
| Envoy proxy with the right amount of polish, knowhow, and
| elbow grease (which we have).
|
| What Cloudflare doesn't have are good general computing
| products and multitenancy supprt. But we have those,
| something like D1, and something like a remote tunnel that
| runs in your browser. So users can launch Stalwart
| instances painlessly and use our secret magic to render it
| in actual browsers without special middleware or extra
| state (or we could offer shared/default Stalwart to do it
| completely out of the box). So that would take you the rest
| of the way from platform-level email to application-level
| and user-level/managed email.
|
| What we don't have is the time to spare in productizing
| that and handling the email-specific routing in envoy, or
| finding capable/knowledgeable people who know all the
| email-specific content and skills. So hit me up if that's
| you, and otherwise, feel free to run wild with the
| knowledge that you can configure Envoy Proxy with an L4
| network filter or HTTP filter that delegates to dynamically
| loadable/configurable wasm if you want a hackable
| Cloudflare workers or even a platform-level alternative
| (hint: store wasm code in FUSE). The L4 filter should work
| for email filtering.
|
| [0] https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/latest/intro/arch_
| overv...
|
| [1] https://github.com/proxy-wasm/spec/tree/main/abi-
| versions/v0... (where you'd start implementing email
| filtering logic)
|
| [2] https://mail.mplode.dev (demo/test Stalwart instance
| we're running in our dev environment. Platform magic would
| allow us to render an email client directly embedded in
| https://brilliant.mplode.dev via remote IMAP/POP3)
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| It feels like more related to this:
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-runs-more-ai-
| mode...
|
| And doing it their way than the traditional way.
|
| Note: Their innovation seems to lie in smaller and fine-tuned
| ( broader catalog) models than larger ones. So Replicate
| seems a perfect match.
|
| The traditional way: Rent a GPU and run inference on an
| container.
| ramimac wrote:
| Probably, but you can check out a more robust list here:
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/acquisitions/
|
| * BastionZero
|
| * Kivera
|
| * Baselime
|
| * PartyKit
|
| * Area 1
|
| * Vectrix
|
| * Zaraz
|
| * Linc
|
| * S2 Systems Corporation
|
| * Neumob
|
| * Eager
|
| * CryptoSeal
|
| * StopTheHacker
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Not everything seems to be tagged as acquisition. Dyte.io was
| acquired, and announced here:
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-
| realtime-...
| echelon wrote:
| Acquisition or acquihire? I don't see a price tag, which seems to
| imply the latter?
|
| How many players are there in this space? Replicate, RunPod,
| Modal, Northflank, FAL, ... Who are the big ones? It's pretty
| crowded, right?
|
| FAL was smart. They ditched the "run any model" to focus on just
| image and video, and now they dominate that space. They raised a
| pretty substantial round recently. Though I don't think there's
| any moat and they'll soon face competition too.
|
| What about these vs. the routers like "Open"Router?
| resiros wrote:
| Looks more of an aquisition for me. They are integrating the
| 50000 models into worker AI.
| redwood wrote:
| Cloudflare is one of those companies similar to palantir where
| the valuation just makes you scratch your head. But bringing in
| AI to try and fill out the AI valuation makes some sense I
| suppose
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Really?
|
| Cloudflare isn't solely a CDN anymore. CDN and DDOS-protection
| were the most logical "first" products to build based on their
| SDN ( Software Defined Networking).
|
| A cloud is the next thing and there's a lot of money involved
| with the cloud. I see them as the only real
| competitor/challenger to Azure, AWS, GCE, ... because they
| aren't bound to regions ( less DevOps)
|
| For example, what you might not know about Durable Objects =>
| https://boristane.com/blog/what-are-cloudflare-durable-objec...
| redwood wrote:
| I'm not saying they're not an interesting company I'm just
| reflecting on their extraordinary valuation multiple which
| puts them in a unique league that are predominantly AI bets.
| Their founder is uniquely strong storyteller. If you look at
| their capital investment it's just not anywhere close to a
| top tier cloud player.. so while they offer some interesting
| building blocks it's just not clear that large workloads move
| there anytime soon
|
| (https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-PwA!,f_auto,q_auto:
| ...)
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Cloudflare went x 10 since their IPO 6 years ago ( stocks).
|
| Revenue:
|
| $ 85 million (2016)
|
| $ 287 million (2019) IPO year
|
| $ 1,670 million (2024)
|
| $ 2,154 million (2025)
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NET/cloudflare/re
| v...
|
| That's not a crazy valuation multiple considering their
| growth.
|
| Palentir is a body shop. Cloudflare is
| infrastructure/cloud. Very big difference ( at least to me)
|
| Stock ( Cloudflare -
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NET/holders/ ): 90.87% % of
| Shares Held by Institutions
|
| Stock ( Palantir -
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PLTR/holders/): 60.09% % of
| Shares Held by Institutions
| redwood wrote:
| It's not a question of crazy or not, it's just an extreme
| end of the multiple spectrum.. and the company is not in
| a positive operating margin position. So you're right
| they have a strong track record and there's optimism they
| turn a profit, but it's highly speculative. Nothing wrong
| with that. Just makes sense they are fleshing out their
| AI story while they're in a position to invest with
| equity IMO
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Their not investing with equity. Cloudflare is cash flow
| positive and re-investing.
| redwood wrote:
| Well I'd assume the acquisition is with equity and that
| much of their employee compensation comes from equity,
| neither of which show up in a free cash flow view. Still
| you do make a good point. I'd have expected bigger
| capital costs that even if amortized would show up on
| cash flow some of the time.. but they appear to run a
| very tight capex ship. So more security SaaS than cloud
| provider IMO
| svara wrote:
| I wrote this comment [0] very recently and when I wrote it had
| in mind that Cloudflare might very well end up being a key
| player in a more centralized Internet that has developed far
| away from its original architecture.
|
| Defense against threats is a pretty strong centralization
| incentive in different kinds of networks - social, biological.
|
| I could imagine that a lot of people are investing based on
| similar scenarios in their minds.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45946365
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| > that has developed far away from its original architecture
|
| This was always their architecture, if you watched closely.
|
| My predication 5 years ago -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26821438
|
| > And cloudflare is self hosting it on more edge locations (
| i think they could even join the big 3 soon)
| redwood wrote:
| Joining the big three requires capital investments orders
| of magnitude beyond where they are. Nevertheless I'd like
| to see someone do it, and if not Equinix then it could be
| them. But sadly the #4 right now appears to be Oracle.
| sabatonfan wrote:
| I havent looked into the financials but the reasons I really
| like cloudflare is that its workers are free without card for
| 100k and even after that its ridiculously cheap and cloudflare
| tunnels and a lot of features are free and really appreciate it
|
| I feel like people like to rub that one time cloudflare messed
| up when I mention it but it was a gambling website and I feel
| like cloudflare could've better communicated it but overall its
| got so much less drama than the other cloud providers and its
| genuinely being really nice imo
|
| But imo, cloudflare is really dirt cheap for just starting out
| and at scale as well especially if using cf workers
|
| I feel like cloudflare can make a bank in enterprice section
| but their pricing model also feels the most saner compared to
| the shady tactics used by google or others with our marketing
| and privacy
|
| I know that the internet is getting centralized but I feel like
| there are some ways of de-centralizing it, (by example
| archiving web pages and then seeding them, helping on internet
| archive or something similar as well)
|
| As an internet user, cf feels mid but sometimes as a guy who
| just wants to deploy shit or basic apis, I "vibe coded" a
| cloudflare worker api which I actively use so much for my own
| purposes setting up a custom redirector and everything without
| paying anything at all, I think I like it.
|
| Honestly, nothing is as good or as bad as it seems except
| palantir's evaluation which makes me feel like 448 pe ratio or
| something similar drove me nuts the other day.
| aryanchaurasia wrote:
| why sell if they were doing good?
| gk1 wrote:
| You don't know how good they were really doing and you don't
| know how good the offer was.
|
| From what I know they were the most used inference provider by
| developers a few years ago, but since the Together AI and
| Fireworks only grew while Replicate seems to have stayed quiet.
| It's a highly competitive low-margin business, so volume is
| critical and if you're losing volume then you're doomed.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| My perception (engineer at modal.com) is that Replicate lost
| out to Fal.ai more than they lost to Together AI and
| Fireworks.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Probably because their last funding round was in 2023 and they
| may have been looking for another round because their revenue
| and cost were probably not really adding up to the valuation
| needed for another round. Running GPU hardware at scale is just
| expensive
|
| Given the price was not announced, it seems investors decided
| to exit via acquisition instead of trying to raise a multi
| hundred million round consistent with a multi billion dollar
| valuation and a high level of ambition that investors are
| shooting for in this space.
|
| If the amount was high, they'd be be bragging about it. Given
| that they aren't, it might be on the lower end of the 2023
| valuation for the then 40M round.
|
| Just speculating here; I don't have any more information.
| Basing this on my understanding of how this stuff works. This
| might actually be the opening round for a few more such
| acquisitions of the somewhat risky investments of a few years
| ago of companies that are probably not going to turn into
| trillion $ unicorns. There are lots of pretty well funded
| startups in this space converting investment capital into cloud
| GPU cost. I think some level of consolidation is overdue and
| might take away some building concern about over exposure in
| the market. Big banks and investors might be getting nervous.
| aryanchaurasia wrote:
| thanks; excellent analysis and makes much more sense to me
| now!
| ilaksh wrote:
| Don't pretend that 98% of startups don't actually dream of an
| exit or payday.
| tasn wrote:
| Congrats Ben and team. Looking forward to seeing what you build
| with Cloudflare's backing!
| coleca wrote:
| Great match up of technologies. Congrats to Ben and the team! I
| had the privilege of working with Replicate when I was at AWS,
| such a great team.
| rvz wrote:
| A very smart move for Cloudflare and a huge missed opportunity
| for Render [0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42833414
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > Replicate's going to carry on as a distinct brand
|
| Uh huh
| baggachipz wrote:
| Well, yeah, for a year or maybe two.
| jumski wrote:
| Very smart move - I assume the Workers will get tight integration
| with the Replicate APIs
| jonplackett wrote:
| I really like both these companies. Replicate just make it so
| easy to bundle a bunch of different AIs up into a prototype - but
| I think they have tonnes of untapped potential that Cloudflare
| could fulfil.
| derelicta wrote:
| I love witnessing companies getting acquired to form monopolies.
| ectospheno wrote:
| Replicate was far from a monopoly and cloudflare was arguably
| worse off in this space. Together they still aren't anywhere
| near monopoly status for running models.
| flashblaze wrote:
| Who are the other ones? I'm aware of fal apart from Replicate
| pm90 wrote:
| I was wondering if/when cloudflare would jump into doing "more
| AI". Of all the paths they could have taken, this seems like a
| reasonable one. Hope that the dev team made some money/cloudflare
| stock from this transaction.
| bogwog wrote:
| > Of all the paths they could have taken
|
| They can't innovate themselves, and rather than try to fix the
| reasons why (change in leadership, corporate structure, etc),
| they just buy a competitor, which they will most likely run
| into the ground. Perfectly reasonable!
| pm90 wrote:
| Their area of expertise is in running large scale infra,
| which they have innovated a lot to get. They're acquiring a
| company that has expertise in an area they're not familiar
| with, which needs large scale compute infra. It seems like
| their needs are aligned in this case.
| pzo wrote:
| They already did and they had Worker AI for quite a while [0].
| But I think it didn't catch up and they have there very old
| models.
|
| Overall I think it's a good acquisition for both of them.
| Replicate would have to have more competitive pricing to
| compete with fal.ai
|
| [0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers-ai/models/
| aitchnyu wrote:
| Is this the platform they are offering on Openrouter?
|
| https://openrouter.ai/provider/cloudflare
| pzo wrote:
| not sure but that's quite possible. I haven't used
| cloudflare workers ai myself because they had quite limited
| number of models and choices so far.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| you've not been paying attention if you think this is their
| first foray
| thayne wrote:
| > all that'll happen is that it's going to get way better
|
| Every acquisition announcement says something like this. It is
| almost never true. In fact, the opposite often happens.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| its better for founder because they can have their exit payout
| ilaksh wrote:
| From an AI integration perspective, I am hopeful that Cloudflare
| may be able to improve "performance on the cheap" for replicate's
| models a little bit.
|
| Replicate has had multiple ways to deploy for auto scaling and
| you can just keep running periodically to keep the system in a
| booted and warm state, but that has always seemed like it would
| be too expensive for a broke bootstrapper like me so I avoided it
| and model popularity was a big deciding factor. Also because of
| that and the potential for boot up, in general I avoided it for
| latency-sensitive things.
|
| I guess there is a limit to what you can do. At some point
| someone has to spend the money to have the resources stay ready.
|
| But with Cloudflare, theoretically the pool of potential users
| goes up, and it becomes more likely for someone to have already
| booted your model.
|
| At the moment I am especially interested in performant and easy
| ways to run models like "sensefvg/InteractiveOmni-8B" or Qwen 2.5
| Omni or models that are even more all in one than that like
| OpenAI Realtime or Gemini Live.
|
| Now that Ernie 5 launched with (Omni) multimodality built in, I
| think within six months, developers are going to start to expect
| speech-to-speech capability from major AI lab releases or product
| line ups. I feel like eventually the spatial-temporal
| understanding of video models will be merged in too to make the
| models understand the world better. But speech in and speech out
| is closer to being a standard expectation.
|
| Instead of running three models for STT->LLM->TTS with a bunch of
| tricks like eager end of turn or speculative decoding that
| basically mean you run the LLM twice or on two different models,
| and possibly getting shut down by API rate limits, the speech to
| speech models are a single model that both understands and
| generates audio as well as text such as for function calls.
|
| This is probably an annoying comment because I am immediately
| trying to increase the requirements to not only being every model
| for cheap, but every model for cheap in in a low latency real
| time streaming way. I just happen to have a contract now that has
| shown me that multimodal like voice to voice is much more
| convenient but also much more expensive and fewer options.
|
| Replicate has been so awesome though. Within like a day of me
| requesting InteractiveOmni, lucataco had it up. So another
| annoying comment, I sure hope he got paid.
| pancakemouse wrote:
| I wonder if they'll continue to support and develop Cog [0],
| which I've found quite useful for local deployments of models (as
| well as to Replicate's servers).
|
| [0] https://github.com/replicate/cog
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| The one time I've interacted with cog, predictably, it
| delivered none of its benefits compared to a vanilla
| pyproject.toml, and all of the downsides of being, ironically,
| not replicable.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Replicate is my preferred go to for image models and easy proof
| of concepts for language models, so congratulations to them!
| kfarr wrote:
| As a Replicate customer, I'm excited about this news. Cloudflare
| has the strategic incentive to invest in this line of business
| and it puts Replicate in the hands of a very good product
| marketing and sales team to get the volume it needs for
| sustainability.
| antipaul wrote:
| Are there indicators in Cloudflare's culture or history to
| suggest that Replicate's strengths (docs, api, design) will
| remain in the long-term?
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| I don't think that much will change regarding to Replicate's
| API because of Cloudflare. It's specifically mentioned in
| Replicate's blog post and it's also not in their best interest.
|
| What's important to know ( I think). Recently, Cloudflare
| released a blog post of Omni for AI inference. I think they
| performance tuned it better than other providers. So their
| costs per inference drops down a lot (
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-runs-more-ai-mode...
| ). Since the performance is OK, they now want to expand usage
| and their model catalog.
|
| Replicate is a perfect fit. Model catalog, infrastructure for
| larger models, more specialised tools for fine-tuning, ...
|
| Eg. For inference, Replicate is basically just a Worker AI
| endpoint and easy to maintain. Fine-tuning could probably be
| something similar.
|
| But then again, that's my 2 cents. It was already mentioned
| that Replicate will stay as a distinct brand.
| JackuB wrote:
| I spent a moment wondering why did _Cloud_ flare buy an on-prem
| tooling startup https://www.replicated.com
| bobnamob wrote:
| The cloud is just someone else's on-prem
| greatgib wrote:
| Now you can see the great plan going on... First, positioning
| itself as the "gatekeeper" of AI services, then owning such a
| service to be able to abuse of your position...
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(page generated 2025-11-17 23:01 UTC)