San Francisco-based tech giant Cloudflare has acquired Human Native, an AI data marketplace headquartered in London.
The deal signals the internet infrastructure firm’s growing focus on how content is accessed and monetised in the age of generative AI.
Founded in 2024 and backed by LocalGlobe and Mercuri, Human Native was set up to help content owners strike fairer, clearer deals with AI firms.
The team includes former staff from DeepMind, Google, Figma and Bloomberg, and will now support Cloudflare as it builds tools that make it easier for creators to package and share content with AI systems on their own terms.
The company specialises in transforming multimedia content into structured, searchable datasets that can be licensed by AI developers.
It aims to help publishers and creators package unstructured material into something that can be understood, valued and sold.
Cloudflare, whose market cap now stands at over $65 billion, said the business has approached data “not as something to be scraped, but as an asset class that deserves structure, transparency and respect”.
The acquisition comes amid growing tension between publishers and AI companies over the scale at which content is being crawled and reused for model training, often without clear permission or compensation.
New York-listed Cloudflare said many content owners want more control over how their work is used by AI systems, with some looking to maximise visibility in training datasets and new search tools, while others want access to be conditional on payment.
It has been developing tools including AI Crawl Control and Pay Per Crawl, designed to give publishers more choice over when and how AI crawlers can access content.
The Human Native team will help accelerate efforts to create better data pipelines for AI developers.
University of Manchester lands world-first partnership with Microsoft
“Cloudflare is betting that the future of the internet requires a new economic model. We completely agree,” said James Smith and Jack Galilee, Human Native co-founders.
“When they approached us and asked if Human Native would be interested in joining them to accelerate this mission together, having got to spend time with them, we realised that this was an opportunity we needed to take for the company to ensure we can all help solve the problem we set out to solve.
“Creating a new economic model for the internet in the age of AI is a mission that would take us years to build alone.
“Cloudflare gives us immediate access to big-company resources while preserving what we care about – the team, the mission, and the problems we want to solve, aligned with the goal of a thriving open web ecosystem.”
Matthew Prince (pictured, main image), co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare, added: “Content creators deserve full control over their work, whether they want to write for humans or optimise for AI.
“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.”
The deal will support Cloudflare’s wider AI plans, including its AI Index, which is designed to let AI developers access structured content updates directly instead of repeatedly crawling the open web.
The business is also investing in infrastructure for potential future payment and licensing models.
It is working on x402 and the new x402 Foundation, launched in partnership with Coinbase, which aims to enable machine-to-machine transactions for digital resources.
Life insurer LV= makes double exec appointment including CTO