Cloud connectivity provider Cloudflare Inc. today announced that it has acquired Human Native Ltd., an artificial intelligence data marketplace startup that connects creators and AI developers, for an undisclosed price.

Founded in 2024, Human Native was built with the idea that creative and expert content shouldn’t be used without consent in large-scale AI training and inference tasks.

The company operates an AI data marketplace that connects publishers, creators and rights holders with companies building and training AI systems. The platform helps content owners prepare and price their data for AI use by giving them a structured way to offer content that is legally licensed, searchable and ready for AI developers to incorporate.

Core to Human Native’s approach is helping rights holders transform messy, unstructured content into usable, AI-ready data. The help includes indexing, cleaning, normalizing and structuring text, audio, video and other media so it’s easier for AI teams to work with and also easier to evaluate and price.

Human Native’s marketplace serves as a hub of licensed, high-quality content that can be acquired without the legal uncertainty of scraping or the need to negotiate bespoke deals for every dataset. Using the marketplace, AI developers can choose from a catalogue of content that meets their technical needs and licensing requirements in a way that is transparent and compliant, while also reducing risks around copyright and intellectual property.

The acquisition of Human Native fits in nicely with a push from Cloudflare last year that included a tool that allows website operators to charge AI developers to access their content. Cloudflare’s commitment to creators is core to the deal.

“Content creators deserve full control over their work, whether they want to write for humans or optimize for AI,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and chief executive officer of Cloudflare.

“Last year we gave publishers and creators the tools to control which bots can access their content, but the real goal has always been to help create a new economic model that actually works for the next phase of the internet,” added Prince. “The Human Native team will help us accelerate the next phase, where we build the tools that allow content to be discovered, priced and purchased through transparent channels. This acquisition is about building the tools needed to protect the longevity of the open internet.”

Coming into its acquisition, Human Native had raised $3.56 million over two rounds, according to data from Tracxn. Investors in the company included LocalGlobe Management Ltd. and Mercuri Inc.

“We believe that creators should have control, compensation and credit when their work is used to power AI products, ensuring equitable compensation for rights holders while enabling responsible AI development,” said Dr. James Smith, co-founder and CEO of Human Native.

Image: Human Native