Cloudflare Inc. today said that it has acquired Bitgenics Pty Ltd., better known as Linc, an Australian startup with technology for simplifying the development of web applications. 

The deal’s size was not disclosed. It’s aimed at advancing Cloudflare’s recent efforts to expand in the web application market, where the company is already a major player thanks to its popular content delivery network for delivering webpages to users.

A big part of building an online service is the frontend development process, or the part of a project that involves crafting the user interface. It’s a complex task that is often performed by multiple developers, or even multiple teams, working side-by-side. Linc has built a platform that makes it easier for those teams to collaborate.

The startup’s platform enables developers to turn their raw code into a fully functioning web page preview that they can share with colleagues via a web link. Linc says that its previews make it easier to look for bugs because they enable teams to view a web page instead of having to sift through code manually. For the same reason, Linc’s platform can come handy when developers need to collaborate with nontechnical users such as designers.

But the startup’s collaboration features aren’t the only reason Cloudflare has bought it. The Linc platform includes features that web development teams can use to roll out code to production automatically after it has been tested for bugs. Among other things, Linc enables users to deploy their projects on Cloudflare Pages, a new web application hosting service that Cloudflare introduced this year.

“Linc’s goal was to give frontend developers the best tooling to build and refine their apps, regardless of which hosting they were using,” Linc Chief Technology Officer Glen Maddern wrote in a blog post. “But we started to notice an important trend —  if a team had a free choice for where to host their frontend, they inevitably chose Cloudflare Workers.”

The deal could also advance the startup’s feature development roadmap. “The most exciting ideas required deep integration with the hosting providers themselves,” Maddern added. 

In particular, the acquisition of Linc might facilitate deeper interaction with Cloudflare’s infrastructure. The deal will position Cloudflare to offer developers not just an easy way to host applications in the form of the recently launched Cloudflare Pages service, but also an easier way to build and deploy those applications. It fills in another piece of the company’s strategy to provide an end-to-end set of products to help customers deliver web services.

Cloudflare has pursued a similar strategy in the cybersecurity market. The company recently announced a comprehensive bundle of security solutions for the enterprise spanning intrusion detection, browser isolation, firewalls and several other product categories. So-called end-to-end product suites have appeal for enterprises because they can be easier to use compared to manually cobbling together disparate tools that don’t necessarily interoperate as well.

Image: Cloudflare