Cloudflare Cofounder Michelle Zatlyn Is New Billionaire As Stock Reaches New High

Michelle Zatlyn, cofounder of web infrastructure and security firm Cloudflare, is tech’s newest billionaire after the company’s stock reached a new record high on Tuesday. Share prices closed at $108.93 on the New York Stock Exchange—more than double that of a year ago—elevating Zatlyn’s net worth to $1 billion.

Zatlyn, who serves as the San Francisco company’s president and chief operating officer, owns about a 5% stake in Cloudflare. She is Cloudflare’s second billionaire, following cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince, whose 13% stake helped him reach the $1 billion mark last May. Prince was worth $4 billion as of the close of trading on Tuesday. A representative for Cloudflare has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Cloudflare protects the websites of more than 4 million customers from cybersecurity threats such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, in which web servers are flooded with malicious traffic that makes them inaccessible. The company says it blocks 70 billion cyber threats per day.

The firm went public in September 2019 at a share price of $18. Its stock price has steadily climbed since the IPO, continuing its uptick at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic as consumers and companies increasingly turned online. The stock is  up some 500% compared to its IPO price. Last year, Cloudflare revenues grew to $431 million, up from $287 million in 2019, though its yearly net losses have also increased—up to $119 million in 2020 from $106 million in the prior year.

Cloudflare was founded in 2009 by Prince and Zatlyn, who met at Harvard Business School, and a third cofounder, Lee Holloway, who had previously worked with Prince on Project Honey Pot, an internet threat tracker. Holloway, previously the lead engineer, stepped down from the company in 2016 due to health issues that were diagnosed as frontotemporal dementia, a rare neurological disease.

In public filings in the past, Cloudflare acknowledged criticism for providing services to customers including controversial websites such as The Daily Stormer and 8chan. The company has defended its stance as supportive of free speech, but ultimately ended its business with both—notably terminating services to 8chan in the aftermath of the El Paso, Texas mass shooting in August 2019 after it was discovered that the perpetrator posted his manifesto to the 8chan message board.

Last year, Cloudflare provided free services to election websites ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, as well as to vaccine distributors for creating digital queues to scale for the high demand in Covid-19 vaccine shots. It also announced a partnership with JD Cloud & AI, a subsidiary of Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com, to operate and support 150 data centers across China.