It might be a little early to say “look out Cloudflare!”, especially given its $20 billion valuation, but a Slovenian startup thinks the web security giant has missed a trick in the market, as developers become more ignored in favor of large corporate clients.
Bunny.net has now raised a $6 million funding round led by Runa Capital and Capital Genetics to prove that companies relying on only one provider is a mistake. In June, Cloudflare suffered an outage that affected traffic in 19 data centers and brought down thousands of websites for over an hour, for instance.
Bunny founder Dejan Grofelnik Pelzel says platforms like Cloudflare, which mostly serve enterprise customers but de-emphasise developers, are leaving some sites vulnerable.
He says Bunny.net aims to take advantage of this by providing a developer-friendly CDN that charges for traffic but has other features offered for free.
Cloudflare operates in a different manner, by making bandwidth free but generating revenues from additional subscriptions for enterprise add-ons.
Instead, Bunny.net lets small developers pay for services, but, they claim, at a lower level than Cloudflare, while offering developer-friendly tools, such as Bunny Fonts, a privacy-geared drop-in replacement for Google Fonts.
It now claims to power more than million websites for over 24,000 paying customers, including brands like Hyundai and AppSumo.
Dmitry Galperin, GP at Runa Capital, said in a statement: “The web stack is evolving and so should the infrastructure. In a race for enterprise customers and their volumes existing CDNs are missing on the innovation game. Bunny.net is filling the gap by offering a modern developer-friendly edge infrastructure ranging from lightning fast content delivery to scriptable DNS and load balancing.”
Pelzel says he built a CDN for himself and realized others might also be interested in it, hence the startup.
“We’re planning to expand from data storage and distribution and now are working on security and global compute solutions. Ultimately, I’d like to help out the Slovenian tech ecosystem and build a company that will be the go-to destination for Slovenian tech graduates,” he said in a statement.
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