Cloudflare Buys Deno and Names No Price, Only a Plan to Merge Two Runtimes

Cloudflare said Friday that it is acquiring Deno, the company behind the Deno runtime, and neither company has disclosed a price. The Deno team will merge its open-source project celld into Cloudflare's workerd, the runtime that executes Workers.

The announcement is a post on Cloudflare's blog, with a page date of Oct. 9, 2026. TechCrunch dated its report Oct. 10 and added the funding history. Deno was co-founded by Bert Belder and Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js.

What the post says is being merged

The post is written in two voices. Dahl, now of Cloudflare, wrote: "The Deno team is joining Cloudflare, and we're merging workerd and celld!" Kenton Varda, a principal engineer on Cloudflare Workers according to TechCrunch, wrote that Dahl and Belder "will be leading a new effort to make workerd self-hosting a first-class supported way" to run Workers-style applications.

The two projects solve different halves of one problem. Cloudflare's workerd is the same code the company runs in production, but its Durable Objects support is limited to a single instance. That is enough for local testing and cannot scale out. Varda wrote that Cloudflare's production routing for Durable Objects is too complex for self-hosters, and that an earlier internal attempt to simplify it did not work.

celld is the Deno team's answer. Dahl described it as "one binary, written in Rust, with object storage as its only external service dependency." The Deno team released it in August 2026, and Dahl wrote that he wanted "the distributed version: IRC channels spread across machines."

What Cloudflare and Deno did not say

The post gives no financial terms, no headcount for the team moving over and no closing date. It says more will follow "in the coming months."

Question	What the sources state
Price	Not disclosed
Deno's total funding	$26 million, including a Series A led by Sequoia (TechCrunch)
Deno's 2022 raise	$21 million (TechCrunch, linked 2022 story)
Future of the Deno runtime	Not described in Cloudflare's post
Deno Deploy	Not mentioned beyond Dahl's remark about operating it
Licence for workerd and celld	Described as open source, licence not named

The omission that matters to existing users is the runtime. Cloudflare's post points to a separate post on the Deno blog for Dahl's explanation, and that post is not part of what Cloudflare published. Anyone running production code on Deno has no statement in this announcement about support, versioning or Node.js compatibility.

The price that cannot be calculated

The usual way to read an acquisition is against what the target raised. Deno took in $26 million in total. Without a purchase price there is no multiple to compute, and the figure would not say much even if there were one, because an acquirer paying for a team and a codebase is not paying for revenue that neither side has published.

The lock-in argument is the one Varda addressed directly. He wrote that being open source and giving customers an escape hatch is good business, and that the idea Workers was designed to lock customers in is wrong. The test of that claim is whether a self-hosted workerd can run Durable Objects across several machines, which today it cannot.

Small infrastructure teams are changing hands without prices attached. Supabase said on Oct. 2 that it would buy Turso alongside a $150 million round, and we reported that the Turso price was not disclosed. Apple's team-and-licence arrangement with Huxe, covered here, is a related kind of deal.

Cloudflare has given no date for the first merged release of workerd and celld. The next observable event is the Deno team's own post and whatever Cloudflare publishes in the coming months about self-hosting.