Cloudflare, the US network and security company, acquired Human Native, a London startup that runs a marketplace where creators and rights holders license their content to AI developers. Cloudflare announced the deal on January 15, 2026. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Cloudflare said the Human Native team would help it build tools that prepare content for AI use, so that AI developers can find, access and pay for reliable data, and creators can set a price for their work. The startup's technology and team are moving into Cloudflare.
The purchase extends a strategy Cloudflare has pursued since 2024 of giving website owners control over the AI crawlers that collect their pages. Its press release referred to Pay Per Crawl, a Cloudflare product that lets sites charge AI bots for access, and to the future integration of Human Native's technology into it.
What Human Native built
James Smith and Jack Galilee co-founded Human Native and launched it in April 2024. Smith, the chief executive, told Maddyness that his interest in AI training data began at DeepMind, where he worked on shipping a DeepMind model to mobile devices through Android. Cloudflare said the team also included people who had worked at Google, Figma and Bloomberg.
The marketplace connects publishers, creators and other rights holders with companies that train AI systems. According to Techstrong.ai, Human Native indexes, cleans and structures text, audio, video and other media so it can be licensed. AI developers get a catalogue of licensed material, which is meant to reduce copyright risk, while rights holders get recommended prices based on the quality of their data and can limit the uses their work is licensed for.
In September 2024 the product was still in a limited-access beta, and the founders told Maddyness they were in talks with large AI labs and publishers.
“We started Human Native with the goal of getting Generative AI out of its Napster era.”
The founders and the funding
Two months after it was founded, Human Native raised a £2.8 million (about $3.6 million) seed round led by the UK venture firms LocalGlobe and Mercuri. Techstrong.ai, citing Tracxn data, reported total funding of $3.56 million across two rounds. No later round was announced before the sale.
Both investors spoke about the deal in Cloudflare's announcement. Ziv Reichert, a partner at LocalGlobe, credited Smith and Galilee with building infrastructure that lets AI teams find and access data while letting data owners price and sell it. Alan Hudson, founding general partner at Mercuri, said the firm invests where media and AI meet and that it had first backed Human Native two years earlier.
Human Native did not report its headcount or revenue.
Why Cloudflare is buying
Cloudflare says millions of organisations use its network, which places it between many publishers and the AI crawlers that visit their sites. In its release, Cloudflare said content owners now face a choice between blocking AI access, shaping their content for AI systems, or selling it at a price that reflects its value, and that it wants to support all three options.
Chief executive Matthew Prince said that in the previous year Cloudflare had given publishers and creators tools to control which bots can reach their content, but that the real aim was a new economic model for the next phase of the internet. Techstrong.ai reported that Prince has described this as Cloudflare's "fourth act", and that the deal builds on AI Crawl Control, a product that lets website operators restrict or charge AI bots.
Smith said in the release that Human Native wanted creators to have control, compensation and credit when their work is used to build AI products.
A contested market for AI training data
The deal came amid continuing disputes over the use of creative work, without permission, to train large language models, as Techstrong.ai noted. Human Native's model of licensed, priced datasets is one answer to that problem; Cloudflare's crawler controls, which let sites block or charge bots, are another. The acquisition puts both under one company.
Techstrong.ai also reported that Cloudflare's share price had risen by more than 60% over the previous year, helped in part by demand for its security products linked to AI.
Cloudflare did not say when Human Native's tools would be generally available to its customers. Its forward-looking statements listed the timing of the integration into Pay Per Crawl, and the timing of the deal's closing, among the uncertainties.
