Cloudflare Acquires Deno; Dahl's Team to Merge celld Into workerd

Cloudflare is buying Deno outright, and the entire team behind the JavaScript and TypeScript runtime is moving with it. The New Stack reported the deal on October 9, 2026. Financial terms were not disclosed. Deno had raised $26 million, including a $21 million Series A led by Sequoia.

The runtime itself gets a one-year clock. The team will only provide bug fixes and security updates for the Deno runtime over the next year, after which official development ends. Deno will remain open source. Deno Deploy, the hosted service, shuts down within six months, with paid users migrated to Cloudflare Workers, a reversal from 2022 when Dahl framed Workers as Deno Deploy's "most direct competitor."

The real prize is celld, a Rust binary the Deno team released in August that lets developers run Workers and Durable Objects on their own servers. Ryan Dahl and co-founder Bert Belder will lead the effort to merge it into workerd, Cloudflare's open-source Workers runtime. Cloudflare's Kenton Varda was candid about why they wanted the team: "When the Deno team released celld in August, we were delighted." Varda added that "Ryan and Bert will be leading a new effort to make workerd self-hosting a first-class supported way to build and run apps."

Dahl's own framing of the move is unusually blunt. He wrote that Deno is "well engineered" but has been "sucked into the gravity well of node compatibility," and that he no longer believes it is where he can do the "most important work." On joining Cloudflare, Dahl said: "I, along with the rest of the Deno company, am joining Cloudflare! I'm motivated by abstractions that give leverage at scale."

JSR, the JavaScript package registry Deno built, keeps running, with its infrastructure migrating to Cloudflare. The deal sits inside a broader run of AI infrastructure consolidation stories we've been tracking.