Which web infrastructure startup was founded by Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway?

The story behind the answer

The web infrastructure startup founded by Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway was Cloudflare.

Cloudflare was founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn. Prince and Holloway had previously worked together on Project Honey Pot, an effort that helped inspire Cloudflare’s approach to identifying malicious online activity. Zatlyn became the company’s third co-founder and later served as president.

Cloudflare operates as an intermediary between users and websites, providing services such as content delivery, DNS, reverse-proxying, DDoS mitigation, and web application security. Its name reflects the original idea of creating a “firewall in the cloud.”

A common mix-up is confusing Cloudflare with Amazon CloudFront, Fastly, or Akamai. Those companies also operate content-delivery infrastructure, but they are separate businesses. Cloudflare’s product range later expanded to include edge computing through Workers and the public DNS resolver 1.1.1.1.

Cloudflare became a public company on the New York Stock Exchange in 2019 under the ticker NET. The question names two founders accurately, although it omits co-founder Michelle Zatlyn.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Sept. 2026

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