Cloudflare Introduces "The Cold Start" Startup Pitch Competition at Cloudflare Connect

Cloudflare Introduces "The Cold Start" Startup Pitch Competition at Cloudflare Connect Cloudflare has launched "The Cold Start," a live startup pitch competition at Cloudflare Connect in San Francisco, offering five early-stage companies the chance to pitch on stage for $500,000 in Cloudflare credits. Five early-stage startups based in the US or Canada with under $10 million in funding will be selected to pitch live. The winning startup receives $500,000 in Cloudflare credits, a San Francisco billboard takeover, and an invite to the VIP speakers dinner. Cloudflare will cover flights to San Francisco for the five finalists to compete on October 19 at Moscone West. Applications are open until Friday, October 2, 2026. Competition Format and Rewards The Cold Start will take place on Monday, October 19, from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. PDT at Moscone West as part of Cloudflare Connect. Cloudflare will fly five selected finalists to San Francisco. Each company will receive five minutes to pitch on stage, followed by three to five minutes of questions from a panel of three judges. The chosen winner will receive $500,000 in Cloudflare credits, a billboard in San Francisco, and entry to the evening's VIP speakers dinner. Eligibility and Application Process The competition is open to early-stage startups located in the United States and Canada that have raised less than $10 million. Applicants are asked to share a one-line pitch, explain what they are building and why it must exist, disclose their funding and revenue stage, and describe how Cloudflare fits into their infrastructure stack. Applications close on Friday, October 2, 2026. Company Context and Startup Initiatives Cloudflare framed the competition around its own origins at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield on September 27, 2010, when an on-stage presentation drove an immediate surge in customer signups. The Cold Start shares the stage at Cloudflare Connect with speakers including Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Bill Gross, and Adam Grant. Cloudflare also operates the Cloudflare for Startups program, which provides eligible early-stage businesses with up to $350,000 in credits for one year.

Cloudflare推出初创公司路演赛The Cold Start，提供50万美元额度奖励 在迎来创立16周年之际，Cloudflare宣布将在旧金山举办的Cloudflare Connect大会期间推出名为“The Cold Start”的现场初创企业路演竞赛，选拔5家早期团队登台展示。 比赛面向融资少于1000万美元、位于美国和加拿大的早期初创企业，申请截止日期为10月2日。 入选的5家决赛团队将获得赞助前往旧金山，每队拥有5分钟现场陈述和3至5分钟评委问答时间。 获胜团队将赢得50万美元Cloudflare积分、旧金山户外广告牌展示机会，以及当晚VIP演讲嘉宾晚宴邀请。 Cloudflare借此回顾2010年在TechCrunch Disrupt舞台上的亮相经历，强调其致力于为初创公司提供开箱即用全球基础设施支持的理念。 竞赛机制与参赛要求 The Cold Start定于太平洋夏令时间10月19日下午在旧金山Moscone West举行，作为Cloudflare Connect大会的一部分。竞赛面向融资总额在1000万美元以内的美加早期公司。Cloudflare负责5家入围企业的差旅费用。参赛者需简要陈述产品构想、存在原因、团队背景、融资营收现状以及Cloudflare技术在其架构中的应用，主办方更看重清晰有说服力的构想本身，而非繁琐的演示文稿与精密测算。 评审阵容与奖励措施 决赛入围者将在Cloudflare Connect现场观众及3位深谙技术与基础设施的评委面前展示，最终胜出者可获得50万美元的Cloudflare服务额度、旧金山广告牌宣传位，并受邀出席当晚的VIP晚宴。本次Connect大会亦邀请了李飞飞、Bill Gross、Adam Grant、Mark Papermaster、尤雨溪等多位业界人士参与。 回溯创立历程与扶持初创愿景 Cloudflare结合2010年9月其联合创始人登上TechCrunch Startup Battlefield舞台、随后流量一周内暴增近10倍的经历，指出早期企业常常需要一个被看见的机会。文章指出，当前软件开发极度依赖全球算力、存储、网络与AI推理等高门槛基础设施，Cloudflare希望通过开发者平台和Cloudflare for Startups等计划，让小型团队在初创期即可直接使用大型科技公司的底层技术支撑。

Sixteen years ago, Cloudflare was one of more than 1,000 startups hoping for a spot on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. We were not, on the face of it, an obvious choice. Cloudflare was infrastructure: we made websites faster and protected them from attack, which was not well understood by the general market at the time. Infrastructure is often invisible right up until the moment it becomes important. But on September 27, 2010, Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn got on the Startup Battlefield stage and launched Cloudflare to the public. During the presentation, people started signing up. Then more people started signing up. By the time the judges had finished asking questions, hundreds of websites had joined Cloudflare, putting our initial five data centers to the test in real time. In the seven days following, traffic through our network increased almost 10x and Cloudflare jumped from the 1,000th largest site online to one of the top 50. Cloudflare didn’t win the main trophy that day. At the awards ceremony, TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington described what we did as something akin to "muffler repair for the Internet" and honestly, he had a point. But then he named us the Most Innovative Company. As Matthew wrote later: *"You may not win the trophy, but you'll receive something else far more important."* There are moments in the life of a company when somebody gives you a room, a microphone, and a small amount of time to explain the thing you have spent months or years obsessing over. Most of the time nothing magical happens. Sometimes, though, the right people hear it at the right moment and suddenly an idea that has mostly existed between a handful of people starts moving through the world. This October, as Cloudflare turns 16, we want to give five early-stage startups a stage of their own. [The Cold Start](https://www.cloudflare.com/connect/cold-start/) is a live startup competition taking place next month at Cloudflare Connect in San Francisco. We’ll select five early-stage companies and give each of them five minutes on stage to explain what they’re building, why it needs to exist, and why they are the people who should build it. We are less interested in perfect pitch decks than in interesting ideas clearly explained. You do not need thirty slides, a suspiciously precise TAM calculation, or a rehearsed story about how your childhood prepared you to disrupt accounts receivable. What we want is to understand the vision: what changed in the world that makes it possible, what you see that other people have missed, and why you cannot stop thinking about it. The five finalists will make their case in front of the Cloudflare Connect audience and three people who've spent a fair amount of their lives thinking about companies, infrastructure, and the Internet: The judges will select one startup to win $500,000 in Cloudflare credits, take over a billboard in San Francisco, and receive an invitation to our VIP speakers dinner that evening. Five companies, five minutes each, and a room full of people paying attention. The Cold Start is open to ambitious early-stage startups, based in the US and Canada, that have raised less than $10 million. Beyond that, we are deliberately keeping the definition broad because the most interesting companies rarely arrive neatly categorized. We want to see ideas that seem obvious once somebody finally builds them, and ideas that initially sound slightly unreasonable. We want infrastructure that appears boring until you realize everyone is going to need it; products that could not have existed a few years ago; strange new interfaces; new ways of building software; things aimed at enormous existing markets and things aimed at markets nobody has bothered to name yet. Most of all, we want to meet people who have noticed something about the world and decided to do something about it. As part of the application, we’ll ask you to tell us who you are, give us your one-line pitch, explain what you’re building and why, tell us about your funding and revenue stage, show us how Cloudflare fits into your stack, and point us toward anything else that helps us understand you and your work. The goal is simple: make us understand why the thing you’re building should exist. *Applications are open now and close Friday, October 2, 2026.* The Cold Start will take place Monday, October 19, from 4:00-5:00 p.m. PDT at Moscone West in San Francisco, as part of [Cloudflare Connect](https://www.cloudflare.com/connect/). Cloudflare will pay for the five finalists to fly to San Francisco for the competition. Connect brings together people building and thinking about what comes next for the Internet. This year’s lineup includes AI pioneer Dr. Fei-Fei Li; Idealab founder Bill Gross; organizational psychologist and author Adam Grant; AMD CTO Mark Papermaster; Vue.js and Vite creator Evan You; Lovable co-founder and CTO Fabian Hedin; and OpenAI member of technical staff and creator of OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger. For five young companies, we are reserving part of that stage. Each startup will have 5 minutes to pitch, followed by 3–5 minutes of questions by the judges. There is something we like about that symmetry. Sixteen years ago, Cloudflare needed someone to take a chance on an infrastructure company with a difficult story to tell and give us a few minutes in front of the right room. Today, we are fortunate enough to have a stage of our own, and we want to pass that same opportunity on to companies that are just getting started. There is a practical reason Cloudflare spends so much time working with startups: very small groups of people have an uncanny ability to attempt very large things. The problem is that ambitious software increasingly depends on infrastructure that, not very long ago, only the largest technology companies in the world could afford to build for themselves. Global compute, storage, networking, security, real-time systems, AI inference, and the ability to survive the possibility that the thing you made suddenly becomes popular should not require a company to first become enormous. We think you should be able to reach for those capabilities on day one. That is part of the idea behind [Cloudflare for Startups](https://www.cloudflare.com/startups/), through which eligible early-stage companies can receive up to $350,000 in Cloudflare credits for one year. It is also part of the reason we continue expanding Cloudflare’s developer platform: a tiny team should be able to build something on Tuesday and if the Internet decides it likes it on Wednesday, spend Thursday focused on the product rather than hastily becoming experts in global infrastructure. Cloudflare began with its own slightly unreasonable premise: that the performance, security, and global compute available to the largest companies on the Internet should be available to everyone on day one. In 2010, we got a chance on a stage to explain why that matters. Sixteen years later, we have a much larger network, a somewhat larger team, and significantly better circuit breakers. Now we want to hear what you’re building.