‘Look at Cloudflare!’ It might be a little early to tell. It’s especially valued at $20B, but one Slovenian startup thinks the web security giant is missing a trick in the market, as developers are increasingly being overlooked for large enterprise clients.
Bunny.net has raised $6 million in funding led by Runa Capital and Capital Genetics to prove that companies are wrong to rely on just one supplier. In June, Cloudflare experienced an outage that affected traffic in 19 databases and brought down thousands of websites for more than an hour.
Rabbit founder Dejan Grofelnik Pelzel says platforms like Cloflare serve mostly enterprise customers, but emphasizing developers is leaving some sites vulnerable.
Bunny.net says it aims to capitalize on this by offering a CDN that charges for traffic but has other features.
Cloudflare works differently by making bandwidth free but generating revenue from subscriptions to additional enterprise add-ons.
Bunny.net instead allows small developers to pay for services, but, at a lower rate than Cloflare, they say they’re offering developer-friendly tools, such as BunnyFonts, a privacy-focused dropdown of Google Fonts.
It says it powers more than 1 million websites for more than 24,000 paying customers, including brands like Hyundai and AppSumo.
“The web stack is evolving and so is the infrastructure,” said Dr. Dimitri Galperin of Runa Capital in a statement. In the face of competition and volumes for enterprise clients, existing CDNs are losing out on the innovation game. Bunny.net is filling the gap by providing a modern developer-friendly edge infrastructure, from lightning-fast content delivery to scripted DNS and load balancing.
Founder and developer Pelzel says he built the CDN for himself and realized others might need it, so he started.
“We plan to expand from data storage and distribution and are now working on security and global computing solutions. Ultimately, I want to help the Slovenian tech ecosystem and build a company that will be a destination for Slovenian tech graduates,” he said in a statement.
