Cloudflare has acquired Human Native, an AI data marketplace that connects content creators with AI developers, as the company steps up its push to build a paid, transparent content economy for the AI era.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
The acquisition is aimed at making it easier for AI companies to discover, access, and pay for high quality content for training and inference, while allowing creators and publishers to price and monetise their data in a structured way.
Cloudflare said the move will help transform original content into AI-ready data and enable a new business model for the internet.
With Human Native’s team and technology, Cloudflare plans to build tools that allow content to be indexed, discovered, priced, and purchased by AI developers through transparent channels. The company said this would give content owners flexibility to block AI access, optimise content for AI use, or sell data at a fair price.
“Content creators deserve full control over their work, whether they want to write for humans or optimise for AI,” Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare said. “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, Human Native focuses on creating a more equitable relationship between AI companies and content creators. It is backed by UK venture firms LocalGlobe and Mercuri, and its team includes veterans from DeepMind, Google, Figma and Bloomberg.
“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,” James Smith, co-founder and CEO of Human Native said.
Investors said the acquisition validates the need for infrastructure that enables ethical and paid access to data. “High quality data is the key that unlocks real differentiation in AI,” Ziv Reichert, partner at LocalGlobe said, adding that Human Native had built systems that allow AI teams to access valuable data while enabling owners to surface, price, and monetise it.
Mercuri founding general partner Alan Hudson said the firm’s belief in rewarding creators for their data has only strengthened as AI adoption has accelerated, calling the partnership with Cloudflare a chance to scale that vision across the internet.
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