After a four-year break from fundraising, Cloudflare Inc. today announced that it has secured $150 million in fresh capital to boost its growth efforts.

The round was led by Franklin Resources Inc., a California investment firm with about $750 billion in assets under management. It joins an impressive roster of existing investors that includes Alphabet Inc.’s CapitalG fund, Microsoft Corp., Qualcomm Inc. and more than a half-dozen others. Cloudflare has raised a total of $330 million to date across six rounds.

San Francisco-based Cloudflare operates a content delivery network spread out over more than 150 data centers worldwide. The platform enables website operators to store a copy of their content in each facility and serve up pages to users from the location closest to them, which speeds loading times. Cloudflare also uses its infrastructure to soak up distributed denial-of-service attacks that seek to knock websites offline by overwhelming them with web requests.

All told, the company processes about 10 percent of the world’s internet traffic. Cloudflare claims that the average user comes into contact with its network 500 times a day.

The company has used this market position to jump into adjacent markets segments. Last year, it launched a service for protecting enterprise systems from distributed denial-of-service attacks and moved into the domain name business.

Cloudflare has also emerged as an influential player in the public cloud market. In September, it teamed up with Google LLC, Microsoft and other infrastructure-as-a-service providers on an initiative to lower bandwidth costs for their enterprise users. As part of the partnership, the providers started routing much of the outbound web traffic from their cloud platforms through Cloudflare’s content delivery network.

The company will use the new capital to speed up product development and grow its international presence. Cloudflare’s decision to raise private funding likely delays the initial public offering it was reportedly planning for the first half of this year. In October, anonymous sources told Reuters that the company had retained Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to underwrite the IPO, which suggests the plan was at a fairly advanced phase.  

The funding from Franklin Resources will give Cloudflare more time to strengthen its balance sheet before hitting the stock market. This may mean the company won’t join Uber Technologies Inc., Lyft Inc. and the other high-profile tech firms set to go public later this year.

Photo: Cloudflare