Cloudflare has agreed to bring The Astro Technology Company’s core development team in-house, securing stewardship of the popular Astro web framework used by major brands including Unilever, Visa and NBC News. Astro’s unique model—loading only critical JavaScript for initial page rendering—addresses search-ranking and conversion challenges tied to slow, JavaScript-heavy sites. Under the deal terms, Astro will remain open source, and Cloudflare will support its continued growth through an Astro Ecosystem Fund backed by partners such as Webflow, Netlify, Wix and Sentry. This move follows Astro’s beta launch of version 6, which introduced expanded JavaScript runtime support, improved site performance and up to 30% faster build times on large-scale projects. For investors, the acquisition underscores Cloudflare’s commitment to expanding its developer-tool portfolio and driving increased usage of its edge network by content-driven site operators.

In a separate transaction, Cloudflare acquired Human Native, a UK-based AI data marketplace founded in 2024 with backing from LocalGlobe and Mercuri. Human Native’s platform facilitates transparent, transaction-level payments between AI developers and content creators—enabling publishers to monetize web content for model training rather than simply blocking or exposing it. Its founding team includes veterans from DeepMind, Google, Figma and Bloomberg, and its tools already power early pilot programs with several enterprise AI groups. Cloudflare plans to integrate Human Native’s tooling into its broader Pay Per Crawl solution, creating a unified framework that could generate new revenue streams from AI-driven data access. For shareholders, the deal highlights Cloudflare’s strategy to capture emerging AI infrastructure spend while bolstering its mission to build a “better Internet” through equitable content-monetization models.