Cloudflare announced the acquisition of The Astro Technology Company team, the creators of the Astro web framework, integrating a group of eight developers and maintainers into its R&D organization. Astro, adopted by major brands such as Unilever, Visa and NBC News and utilized by more than 250,000 developers worldwide, optimizes content-driven sites by loading only critical code for initial render. Under the deal, Astro will remain open source, with Cloudflare committing an initial $5 million to the Astro Ecosystem Fund alongside partners Webflow, Netlify, Wix and Sentry. This integration follows the beta release of Astro 6, which introduced support for three additional JavaScript runtimes, reduced average build times by 30% and improved runtime performance by 20% compared with Astro 5. Cloudflare expects full integration of Astro’s features into its Workers platform by Q4 2026, enhancing its edge computing offerings and potentially boosting developer adoption metrics by 15% year-over-year.

Cloudflare has acquired UK-based Human Native, a startup founded in 2024 and backed by LocalGlobe and Mercuri, to establish a transparent marketplace connecting content creators with AI developers. Human Native’s platform, which processed over 10 million transactions in its first year, enables creators to price and monetize text, image and code assets for model training. The six-member Human Native team brings expertise from DeepMind, Google, Figma and Bloomberg, and will work to integrate with Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl service. Cloudflare did not disclose the deal’s value but expects the combined platform to onboard at least 500 publisher partners by mid-2026. CEO Matthew Prince highlighted that the acquisition supports Cloudflare’s vision for an AI-driven Internet economy, projecting a 25% increase in AI-related revenue streams within 12 months of integration.