Deno

Developer Tools · Cloud Infrastructure · Serverless

Acquisition

Cloudflare acquires Deno, folding Ryan Dahl's runtime into Workers

The deal hands Cloudflare both ends of a would-be exit route, as the open-source code teams used to leave Workers now comes from inside the company itself.

• Cloudflare announced on October 9, 2026 that the entire Deno team is joining the company, with financial terms not disclosed.
• Deno, founded by Node.js creator Ryan Dahl in 2018, built a JavaScript/TypeScript runtime and later a hosting service, Deno Deploy, positioned as a safer alternative to Node.js.
• Cloudflare is merging Deno's celld, an open-source implementation of Workers and Durable Objects for self-hosting, into its own workerd runtime, with Dahl and Deno co-founder Bert Belder leading the integration.
• Deno will ship monthly bug-fix and security releases of its runtime for one more year before ending development, and Deno Deploy will keep running for six months before shutting down.
• Celld, released in August 2026, let developers run a distributed, scalable version of Workers and Durable Objects outside Cloudflare, since Cloudflare's own open-source workerd only supports Durable Objects as a single instance.
• Deno had raised roughly $26 million across two funding rounds since its 2018 founding before being acquired.
• The companies had a competitive history, including a 2021 incident where Cloudflare accidentally blocked Deno's site after misclassifying its files as video content.
• With Deno's independently sponsored escape hatch absorbed into Cloudflare, the incentive to keep Workers' open-source exit path functional now rests entirely on Cloudflare's own commercial judgment.