Cloudflare has acquired Deno, the startup behind the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime of the same name, to expand its Workers development platform and improve support for self-hosted applications. The acquisition, announced on Friday, October 9, 2026, will bring Deno’s engineering team into Cloudflare, although the companies have not disclosed the financial terms.
In a joint announcement, Cloudflare principal engineer Kenton Varda and Deno co-founder Ryan Dahl outlined plans to combine their technologies. The companies intend to make the Workers programming model available on infrastructure outside Cloudflare’s network.
Cloudflare Workers allows developers to build and run applications across Cloudflare’s distributed network without managing traditional server infrastructure. The acquisition will focus on making that programming model easier to operate on privately managed servers.
Deno’s Celld Technology to Join Cloudflare Workers
Deno was co-founded by Dahl, who also created Node.js, and software engineer Bert Belder. The company recently introduced celld, an open-source implementation of Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects designed for self-hosted environments.
Varda said Cloudflare’s engineering team welcomed celld because it addressed technical challenges the company had encountered when attempting to make its Workers runtime suitable for self-hosting.
Under the agreement, Dahl and Belder will lead development efforts to combine celld with workerd, Cloudflare’s open-source Workers runtime. The companies plan to integrate their technologies to support applications running on Cloudflare’s network or independent infrastructure.
Varda also addressed concerns that Cloudflare designed Workers differently from competing cloud platforms to prevent customers from switching providers. He argued that supporting open-source software and allowing developers to operate applications outside Cloudflare’s infrastructure aligns with the company’s business interests.
Deno Runtime Development to End After One Year
According to Deno’s announcement, the company will continue supporting its standalone runtime for another year, providing monthly security updates and bug fixes. Development will then end, although the runtime will remain open source for community contributors.
Deno Deploy, the company’s application hosting service, will remain operational for six months before shutting down. Paying customers will receive assistance migrating their applications to Cloudflare Workers.
Meanwhile, Deno’s JSR package registry will continue operating, with its infrastructure transferred to Cloudflare. The company will also maintain support for rusty_v8 and work toward integrating it with workerd.
Dahl said the combined engineering teams will focus on Workers and Durable Objects, particularly their application in AI agent development. Durable Objects provides persistent state, WebSocket connectivity, and serverless execution capabilities for distributed applications.
Before the acquisition, Deno had raised approximately $26 million in venture funding, including a $21 million Series A round led by Sequoia Capital in 2022.
Featured image credits: Wikimedia Commons
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