Cloudflare Looks To Boost AI, Agent Development With Outerbase Acquisition

The acquisition of Outerbase and its developer database technology will make it easier for developers on the Cloudflare platform to build, deploy and manage data-heavy AI applications and AI agents.

Cloudflare is enhancing the application development capabilities of its connectivity cloud service platform with today’s acquisition of developer database company Outerbase.

The Outerbase acquisition will “dramatically enhance” the ability of developers working with the Cloudflare platform to build and deploy database-backed, full-stack, AI-enabled applications on Cloudflare’s global network, the company said in an announcement of the acquisition deal.

“Businesses are racing to build AI-powered applications to be as productive, innovative, and competitive as possible. Our goal is to make it easy and accessible for any developer, regardless of expertise, to build database-backed applications that can scale,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, in a statement.

"Outerbase's technology and design expertise are an important factor in accelerating this improved developer experience,” he said.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Founded in 2022, San Francisco-based Outerbase was backed by a handful of venture capital firms, including Y Combinator, Surface Ventures and Goodwater, and a dozen or so individual investors.

Cloudflare, also headquartered in San Francisco, is a leading provider of internet, cloud and network services including application and content delivery, cybersecurity, SASE (secure access service edge) and developer services.

The Outerbase acquisition will bolster Cloudflare’s developer service offerings – especially to meet the surging demand for capabilities to build AI and generative AI applications and AI agents, according to the company.

Modern-day applications – including AI applications – require an underlying database to “maintain context, store conversations, and act on data,” Cloudflare said. The Outerbase technology will aid developers by ensuring that the databases that power those applications can be quickly built and easily managed at scale.

Outerbase itself is built on Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare’s serverless execution environment for running JavaScript code on the company’s global network. Cloudflare said that will make it easy for the Outerbase technology to be “rapidly incorporated” into Cloudflare Durable Objects (for building real-time, interactive applications), the Cloudflare D1 relational database, and Cloudflare’s Agents SDK tools for building and deploying AI agents.

“At Outerbase, our mission has always been to make working with data easier for developers. Joining Cloudflare allows us to keep doing that, but faster and at a much larger scale," said Brandon Strittmatter, Outerbase co-founder and CEO, in a statement. "We’ve built Outerbase on top of Cloudflare, so this next step feels natural. Now, we get to take what we’ve built and make it part of the platform itself.”

The Outerbase acquisition comes as Cloudflare is in the midst of a major sales strategy shift that emphasizes working with solution and service providers.