Cloudflare Acquires Zaraz; Shares Rise 2.7%

Web infrastructure and website security company Cloudflare, Inc. (NET) recently announced that it has acquired Zaraz, a company that focuses on improving website speed and protecting privacy. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed so far.

Following the news, shares of the company rose 2.7% to close at $160.65 in the extended trading session on Wednesday.

Strategic Impact

With this buyout, Cloudflare will add a company to its portfolio that tackles the problem of speed and privacy for companies engaging third-party tools to gather data. Zaraz allows companies to run as many third-party tools as they need without compromising on speed on their websites while protecting the privacy of their customers.

Zaraz uses Cloudflare Workers to replace the multiple network requests of each tool with one single request, effectively transforming a messy web of extensions into a single lightweight application.

Management Commentary

The CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, said, “We were impressed by how the team at Zaraz used Cloudflare Workers in a unique way to help businesses get the insights they need, while delivering the lightning performance consumers expect. We’re thrilled to have them join the team, and are excited to keep investing in the developers that build on our platform.”

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Price Target

Recently, JMP Securities analyst Patrick Walravens reiterated a Buy rating on the stock with a price target of $220, which implies upside potential of 37.1% from current levels.

The Street is cautiously optimistic about the stock and has a Moderate Buy consensus rating based on 6 Buys and 9 Holds. The average Cloudflare price target of $208.08 implies that the stock has upside potential of 29.7% from current levels. Shares have gained 107.5% over the past year.

Website Traffic

TipRanks’ Website Traffic Tool, which uses data from SEMrush Holdings (SEMR), the world’s biggest website usage monitoring service, offers insight into Cloudflare’s performance this quarter.

According to the tool, the Cloudflare website recorded a 16.33% monthly rise in global visits in November, compared to the same period last year. Further, year-to-date, website traffic has grown 0.65%, compared to the previous year.