Cloudflare Acquires Astro Team, Launches Astro 6 Beta with Performance Upgrades
Cloudflare is acquiring the Astro Technology Company team, creators of the Astro web framework used by Unilever, Visa and NBC News, integrating them to boost its high-performance web development offering. Astro 6 beta launched with support for additional JavaScript runtimes, enhanced performance and faster build times, which Cloudflare will steward.
1. Cloudflare Acquires Astro Team to Bolster Web Performance
Cloudflare announced it has acquired The Astro Technology Company team, the creators of the Astro web framework, integrating roughly a dozen core developers into its Product organization. Astro is deployed by enterprise clients including Unilever, Visa and NBC News and by over 300,000 independent developers for building content-driven sites that deliver sub-one-second load times. The framework’s hallmark is partial hydration, which ensures only critical JavaScript is executed on page load, improving search rankings and conversion rates. This week Astro 6 entered beta, adding support for multiple JavaScript runtimes, reducing average build times by 20%, and enabling advanced caching strategies. Cloudflare will maintain Astro as an open-source project, while funding development through an Astro Ecosystem Fund backed by industry partners Netlify, Webflow, Wix and Sentry. CEO Matthew Prince said the acquisition underscores Cloudflare’s commitment to speed and performance across its connectivity cloud, which already serves more than 30% of global Internet requests.
2. Acquisition of Human Native Expands AI Data Marketplace
In a separate deal, Cloudflare has acquired Human Native, a UK-based AI data marketplace founded in 2024 and backed by LocalGlobe and Mercuri, to create transparent, fair-pricing tools for AI developers and content creators. Human Native’s platform has facilitated transactions for over 10 million data points sourced from publishers and individual creators, enabling dynamic pricing models based on usage volume and content type. The four-person founding team, which includes veterans from DeepMind, Google and Bloomberg, will join Cloudflare’s AI product group to integrate Human Native’s indexing and payment infrastructure into Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl solution. This move addresses a growing investor focus on monetization pathways for digital content: Cloudflare projects that by 2027 the AI data market will exceed $18 billion in annual transactions. CEO Matthew Prince noted that enabling creators to set transparent fees for AI training data will foster a sustainable Internet economy and enhance Cloudflare’s competitive positioning in the AI infrastructure space.