Cloudflare announced on Thursday that it has acquired Human Native, a UK–based AI data marketplace founded in 2024 and backed by LocalGlobe and Mercuri. While financial terms were not disclosed, the deal brings into Cloudflare’s fold a team of veterans from DeepMind, Google, Figma and Bloomberg. Human Native’s platform manages transactions between content creators and AI developers, enabling creators to price, package and sell high-quality training data. The acquisition accelerates Cloudflare’s roadmap for a new pay-per-crawl system, which will allow AI developers to discover, access and purchase reliable data through transparent, programmable APIs integrated into Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud.

For investors, the deal underscores Cloudflare’s strategy to diversify beyond traditional CDN and security offerings by addressing the burgeoning demand for ethically sourced training data. Cloudflare currently blocks over 25 billion online threats daily and serves more than 4 million customer domains; integrating Human Native’s marketplace could drive incremental revenue from data licensing fees. By enabling creators to capture value from existing content and by embedding AI-ready data pipelines into its network, Cloudflare aims to strengthen its moat against peers in the connectivity cloud space and capitalize on the estimated $100 billion AI data market projected by 2027.