Cloudflare is taking over Deno, the startup co-founded by Node.js creator Ryan Dahl to build a more secure JavaScript and TypeScript runtime. Dahl announced on 9 October 2026 that the whole Deno team is moving to Cloudflare. Terms were not disclosed.
The move ends Deno as an independent product line. Deno Deploy, the company's hosting service, will keep running for six months and then shut down, with help for paying customers who move to Cloudflare Workers. The Deno runtime will get monthly bug-fix and security releases for one more year, after which the team will stop developing it. The code stays open source under the MIT licence, and Dahl said others are welcome to carry it on.
JSR, the JavaScript package registry Deno built, will keep operating, with its infrastructure moving to Cloudflare. The team will also keep supporting its rusty_v8 project and work on bringing it into workerd.
What Deno built
Dahl started Deno in 2018 to fix what he saw as flaws in Node.js, especially around security and dependency management, The New Stack noted. The project focused on built-in permissions, native TypeScript, web-standard APIs and shipping apps as single executables. Over time it added compatibility with Node.js so users could keep using the existing package ecosystem.
The company later launched Deno Deploy, a serverless hosting service that put it in direct competition with Cloudflare Workers. In August 2026 it released celld, an open-source project that recreated the Workers and Durable Objects programming model for developers who want to run distributed apps on their own servers. Deno openly credited Cloudflare principal engineer Kenton Varda and the Workers team for the design.
The two companies have history. In 2021 Cloudflare mistakenly blocked Deno's website and module registry after it misidentified TypeScript files as video, forcing Deno to move its infrastructure.
“We have always thought this and wanted to build this, but we just didn't have the right talent to see it through. The Deno team is exactly the talent we need to finally make it happen.”
Why Cloudflare wants the team
The plan is to merge celld into workerd, Cloudflare's open-source Workers runtime, with Dahl and Deno co-founder Bert Belder leading the work. The goal is a version of Cloudflare's programming model that companies can run on their own infrastructure. Dahl told The New Stack that a fleet of workerd instances will need only a standard object storage bucket for coordination and storage, and that the combined project is expected to stay open source, likely under the Apache 2.0 licence that celld uses.
Varda admitted in a joint blog post that Cloudflare had struggled to make workerd practical outside its own network and had not built the surrounding tools and services. He told The New Stack that keeping the model exclusive to Cloudflare would shrink its market and weaken it against the large cloud providers, and that the company had always wanted to build this but lacked the right people.
Dahl also pointed to AI agents. In his post he wrote that Durable Objects combine cheap serverless execution, persistent state, WebSockets and a high-level JavaScript interface, which he said suits agent harnesses, and that this is why celld centres on Durable Objects.
The founders and the funding
Deno was set up as a company in March 2021 with $4.9 million in seed money from Four Rivers Ventures, Rauch Capital, Long Journey Ventures, Mozilla Corporation, Shasta Ventures and longtime Node.js contributor Ben Noordhuis. In June 2022 it raised a $21 million Series A led by Sequoia, bringing total funding to about $26 million. At the time it had 17 employees, TechCrunch reported.
Dahl said the runtime's growing compatibility with Node.js had left Deno maintaining a second implementation of the same technology, and that bigger problems could be solved with a distributed programming model. He argued that Deno's influence will last through features such as native TypeScript support and permission controls that Node.js has partly adopted.
Another JavaScript runtime changes hands
The deal follows Anthropic's purchase of Bun, another Node.js alternative, in December 2025. The difference is that Anthropic committed to keep developing Bun as an open-source runtime, while Deno's runtime will stop being developed by its creators within a year.
For developers who want the runtime to survive, Dahl has pointed to io.js, the community fork of Node.js that later merged back into the main project, as a model for how the community could keep Deno going.
