Cloudflare Inc., the connectivity cloud company, has announced the acquisition of Human Native, an AI-focused data marketplace designed to connect content creators with AI developers. The move strengthens Cloudflare’s ambition to shape an AI-driven Internet economy where creators can better control, price, and monetise their content while enabling developers to access high-quality, reliable data efficiently.
By integrating Human Native’s expertise, Cloudflare plans to accelerate the development of tools that help publishers and creators transform existing content into discoverable, indexable, and monetisable datasets for AI use. The acquisition supports Cloudflare’s broader effort to establish transparent and fair mechanisms through which AI companies can source content ethically and at scale.
Human Native’s platform focuses on simplifying how data is prepared and surfaced for AI developers, while ensuring creators retain ownership and visibility over how their content is used. This aligns closely with Cloudflare’s recent initiatives aimed at giving publishers greater control over bot access and content usage.
“Content creators deserve full control over their work, whether they want to write for humans or optimize for AI,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare. “Last year we gave publishers and creators the tools to control which bots can access their content, but the real goal has always been to help create a new economic model that actually works for the next phase of the Internet. The Human Native team will help us accelerate the next phase, where we build the tools that allow content to be discovered, priced, and purchased through transparent channels. This acquisition is about building the tools needed to protect the longevity of the open Internet.”
Founded in 2024 and backed by UK-based venture capital firms LocalGlobe and Mercuri, Human Native was created to address the imbalance between AI companies and content creators. Its team brings experience from organisations such as DeepMind, Google, Figma, and Bloomberg, strengthening Cloudflare’s ability to build scalable solutions for responsible AI data consumption.
“We started Human Native with the goal of getting Generative AI out of its Napster era. We believe that creators should have control, compensation and credit when their work is used to power AI products, ensuring equitable compensation for rights holders while enabling responsible AI development,” said Dr. James Smith, co-founder & CEO of Human Native. “Our discussions with Cloudflare, from Matthew to the entire team, have shown us that our values could not be more aligned, we believe in the same mission and together we will have the opportunity to deliver solutions at Internet scale.”
Investors highlighted the strategic value of the acquisition in the evolving AI ecosystem.
“High quality data is the key that unlocks real differentiation in AI,” said Ziv Reichert, partner at LocalGlobe. “James and Jack Galilee have built the infrastructure that enables AI teams to discover and access valuable data across the internet, while allowing data owners to surface, price, and monetise it seamlessly. We’re incredibly excited to see them continue this mission with Cloudflare.”
“At Mercuri, we invest at the intersection of media and AI, and Human Native has embodied this thesis from the outset,” said Alan Hudson, Founding General Partner, Mercuri. “When we first invested two years ago, we believed there was a clear need to reward creators fairly for their data and to enable AI to progress with high-quality, ethically sourced data. Our conviction around these principles have only grown stronger in today’s market. We are now excited to see how the Human Native team continues on this mission in partnership with Cloudflare.”
