$782.5 million in third-quarter revenue pushed Cloudflare past $3 billion in annualized sales. The figure is up 39% from a year earlier — the company’s fastest revenue growth in nearly four years — and co-founder and chief executive Matthew Prince called it Cloudflare’s best quarter ever in a company release.
Management also raised its full-year 2026 outlook. Cloudflare now expects revenue of $2.963 billion to $2.964 billion, non-GAAP operating income of $462 million to $463 million, and non-GAAP earnings of $1.35 a share. For the fourth quarter it guided to revenue of $845 million to $846 million and non-GAAP earnings of $0.43 a share.
“We have built the development platform for the AI-powered Internet—and as digital threats escalate, organizations of every size continue to rely on Cloudflare for protection,” Prince said in the release. “Our engine is firing on all cylinders, and we’ve found an even higher gear for this next phase of growth.”
Workers, large customers, and a denser edge
On the earnings call, chief financial officer Thomas Seifert tied the beat to rapid growth in the Workers Developer Platform and agentic workloads, larger customer cohorts, and go-to-market execution. Prince said the company has more than 5,000 customers paying over $100,000 a year, up 25% year over year, and added more than 158,000 paying customers in the quarter — 110% growth in paying-customer adds from a year earlier.
Active developers on the platform passed 10 million, more than double the count at the start of 2026, Prince said, pointing to isolate-based architecture that starts apps in milliseconds and bills for compute used — the same Workers stack Cloudflare has been opening up for self-hosted and edge runtimes. He described one AI company that signed an $11 million one-year Workers contract after finding legacy hyperscaler idle-compute charges too costly for tens of millions of AI-generated apps. Dollar-based net retention rose to 122%, and current remaining performance obligations grew 37% year over year.
That developer push sits beside a security story WPN readers already know from the php2shell wave. Prince told investors some of the worst internet security bugs in years landed in a two-week stretch, that Cloudflare often gets early notice through a trusted-reporter process, and that, based on third-party data, about 5% of the web had been added to Cloudflare’s network since July 1. The Next Web reported he said Meta is among those customers, and that some sites treat AI agents as a “bane to their business.”
Margins, GAAP loss, and a new revenue chief
Non-GAAP operating income was $137.1 million, or 17.5% of revenue, up from 15.3% a year earlier. On a GAAP basis Cloudflare still posted a $67.9 million operating loss and a $34.1 million net loss ($0.10 per share). Free cash flow was $82.1 million, or 10% of revenue. Cash, cash equivalents, and available-for-sale securities stood at about $5.1 billion as of Sept. 30.
Christian Smith joined as president of revenue, succeeding Mark Anderson, who retires from the role at year-end and will stay as an adviser. Smith previously was chief revenue officer at Splunk and sits on the boards of Atlassian and Feedzai; The Next Web reported his brief is to scale sales toward $5 billion in annual recurring revenue and beyond.
Seifert said Cloudflare now expects to reach GAAP profitability in the fourth quarter — earlier than the 2028 target it had outlined at Investor Day. Shares jumped about 15% after hours Thursday even as they fell 8% in the regular session amid a broader AI-stock sell-off, The Next Web reported. Cloudflare will host investor meetings at RBC’s conference on Nov. 18 and Barclays’ on Dec. 9.
WebProNews is an iEntry Publication