Cloudflare announced a live pitch competition called The Cold Start at the Connect conference, selecting five startups to present in front of co-founders Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn, and the CTO. According to the official post, each startup has five minutes, and the winner will receive a billboard in San Francisco and $500,000 in Cloudflare credits.

The company event page states that the event will take place on October 19 from 4 PM to 5 PM at Moscone West in San Francisco, with each startup getting ten minutes. The awards are split into two parts: judges will select the billboard winner, while the audience will choose the $350,000 credit winner and receive a VIP dinner seat with speakers on Monday night. The judges include the two co-founders and the CTO.

Application requirements include explaining the product, team, and how to integrate Cloudflare into the tech stack. The internal promotion targets early-stage companies with less than $10 million in funding and mentions that Cloudflare's founders pitched at TechCrunch Battlefield sixteen years ago. The agenda on the same day also includes Cloudflare University and a partner summit, with the main conference running from October 20 to 21.

The regular startup program has already issued credits ranging from $5,000 to $250,000 without taking equity. This event combines credits, city billboard space, and face-to-face evaluations from founders on the opening day of the conference, aimed at attracting a new batch of products that default to routing traffic through its network for developer platforms and edge computing.

In market mechanics, buyers are early teams that need to be seen by infrastructure vendors, while sellers are Cloudflare's stage, distribution, and credit inventory. The event is driven by the need for a shareable opening at the conference, as well as the developer platform's goal to secure default access at the AI application layer. Funds are locked in the form of credits on their own bills, with billboards providing brand exposure; the beneficiaries are the five selected companies that bind their architecture to Cloudflare, while competing cloud vendors face pressure to attract the same batch of founders with cash subsidies.

Source: Public Information