Cloudflare has agreed to buy AI startup Replicate – a company that provides an API server giving "access to 50,000+ models through one API and one contract."
“We’re building the AI cloud. We’ve assembled all the primitives on top of our network. Now we’re adding the best team, and models to execute," commented Cloudflare's CTO Dale Knecht of the planned acquisition.
“The acquisition is expected to close in the next two months and is subject to customary closing conditions,” Cloudflare said, without disclosing terms. Users will be able to "run models in Replicate's flexible environment or on Cloudflare's serverless platform, all from one place," it added.
Replicate’s APIs will continue working the same way, it affirmed – but Cloudflare customers will now get the “new ability to run fine-tunes and custom models directly on Workers AI” (a serverless GPU inference platform.)
“Replicate's going to carry on as a distinct brand, and all that will happen is that it’s going to get way better: it’ll be faster, we’ll have more resources, and it’ll integrate with the rest of Cloudflare’s Developer Platform,” the startup (which lists X employees on LinkedIn) posted of the news.
Cloudflare buys Replicate
Cloudflare said in a blog: “Every new model has different dependencies, requires specific GPU hardware (and enough of it), and needs a complex serving infrastructure to scale. Developers found themselves spending more time fighting with CUDA drivers and requirements.txt files than actually building their applications…”
“Replicate’s catalog spans more than 50,000 open-source models and fine-tuned models… [its] toolset goes beyond that to make it possible for developers to access any models they need in one place. Period. With their marketplace, they also offer seamless access to leading proprietary models like GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet, all through the same unified API.”
Cloudflare has been building out its ability to let customers run AI inference on its hardware and pushing to bring in more enterprise customers across its portfolio of compute, storage, networking, security tools and more.
It reported quarterly revenue of $562 million last month (up 31% year-over-year) and ended the quarter with more than 4,000 large customers (up 23% year-on-year) with their revenue accounting for 73% of revenue during the quarter. It has over 296,000 paying customers in total.
More to follow.
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