Cloudflare Acquires Deno as Ryan Dahl Pivots to Edge Infrastructure

Cloudflare has purchased Deno, the startup founded by Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, as first reported by The Register. The deal serves as an acquihire for Dahl and 12 colleagues who will now focus on expanding Cloudflare’s Workers platform for potential open-source use.

While Deno was designed as a rewrite of Node.js to address early architectural flaws, Dahl told The Register that the project struggled to achieve escape velocity because it could not deviate significantly from Node.js. Sequoia had previously backed the company with $21 million in 2022, and the runtime had reached 400,000 monthly users by August. Cloudflare intends to maintain the Deno runtime for one year before ending development, while Dahl seeks a new home for the MIT-licensed project.

Dahl is now pivoting toward distributed micro-servers, specifically focusing on Cloudflare’s Durable Objects—a technology originally created by Kenton Varda. Dahl previously launched an open-source implementation of this technology called celld. His mission at Cloudflare is to merge the work of celld with workerd, an open-sourced version of the Workers runtime, to create a standalone JavaScript/WebAssembly runtime.

This shift represents a move toward a more efficient model; while Node and Deno require hundreds of megabytes of memory, this new approach could require only 300 KB per instance. The Register notes that the market for independent runtimes is tightening, citing both the Deno acquisition and Anthropic’s recent acquisition and rewriting of Bun.