Cloudflare launches The Cold Start: 5 startups pitch live, winner gets $500k in credits
Cloudflare Blog · rss · 2026-09-28
Cloudflare will host The Cold Start, a live startup competition at Cloudflare Connect on October 19 in San Francisco:
- Open to early-stage startups that have raised under $10 million; five finalists each get 5 minutes to pitch plus 3–5 minutes of Q&A.
- Judges are Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn and CTO Dane Knecht; the winner receives $500,000 in Cloudflare credits, a San Francisco billboard, and a VIP dinner invite, with travel covered.
- It echoes Cloudflare's own 2010 TechCrunch Disrupt debut, where traffic grew nearly 10x within a week of launching.
- Cloudflare also highlights its startup program offering up to $350,000 in credits per year.
Applications are open and close October 2, 2026.
More from Companies & People
- Every AI assistant suddenly cares about privacy the moment you hook up a rival — signulll · 2026-09-29
- AI made building so cheap that 5 launches beat 5 months of thinking — alexmacgregor__ · 2026-09-29
- How to Email a Professor About Joining Their Lab, From a Professor — CSProfKGD · 2026-09-29
- $15M seed at $300M valuation from GC with ~$200M in signed revenue already — latkins · 2026-09-29
- Stanford CS 329X releases lecture slides on human-centered LLM design — stanfordnlp · 2026-09-29
- Elon Musk endorses Grok as user builds real-estate, e-commerce and GPU-sales agents in 24 hours — elonmusk · 2026-09-29