Cinder

Cinder quickly scales their AI innovation and offloads IT complexities through the Cloudflare connectivity cloud

Founded in 2021, Cinder enables leading companies to combat the abuse, manipulation, and other harmful content endemic online, where adversarial threats evolve as quickly as the tools used to defend against them.

Cinder stands out by applying AI-driven defenses to some of the most visible and high-stakes trust and safety challenges in the industry. As a fast-growing startup founded by former intelligence officers, the company prioritizes rapid experimentation and innovation as competitive differentiators.

Challenge: Scaling quickly while safeguarding sensitive data

Cinder operates under constant pressure from sophisticated adversaries while onboarding new engineers and handling a growing volume of sensitive customer data. Traditional security and access models would have slowed hiring and added operational overhead that a lean team could not afford.

The company chose Cloudflare to secure applications, accelerate onboarding, and support rapid iteration on a single, globally-distributed platform — without building a large, specialized security team.

“Being a startup, I think the biggest benefit for us is that Cloudflare enables speed of innovation,” says Declan Cummings, co-founder and Head of Engineering at Cinder. “That’s a key differentiator for our engineering team, and without it, we can’t succeed as a company.”

Connecting and protecting customers and apps on the Cloudflare connectivity cloud

Cinder supports a wide customer base that includes frontier AI model companies and some of the top social platforms and marketplaces — where trust and safety issues are highly visible and constantly evolving.

“The issues that we help our customers with are in the news every day,” says Cummings. To operate at startup speed while protecting users at every layer, Cinder relies on the Cloudflare connectivity cloud, a unified platform that combines security, performance, and networking services on a global network.

Integrated into the connectivity cloud is Cloudflare One, a secure access service edge (SASE) platform. This additional security, explains Cummings, “allows us to deal with the customer issues we encounter every day, knowing our applications are secure and we can reliably configure new services without too much overhead.”

Streamlining the onboarding process with Cloudflare One

Cloudflare also helps secure access for Cinder’s internal users with a single, centrally-managed zero trust model. In addition to protecting applications and services, zero trust streamlines internal access policies and makes onboarding as efficient as possible.

“As we grew, we quickly realized that we needed a single solution to reliably protect all the different parts of our application and onboard new engineers quickly,” says Cummings.

New hires can access the tools they need quickly, while security policies remain consistent and centrally managed. Engineers get up to speed significantly faster than the industry norm.

“When I talk to our peer companies or other heads of engineering, I hear that it takes weeks or months for an employee to become fully onboarded,” says Cummings. “At Cinder, we really pride ourselves on about three days until an engineer is fully productive.”

Accelerating experimentation and internal workflows with Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare Workers plays a central role in how Cinder builds and operates their platform. By connecting various services together and providing serverless compute capability, Cloudflare Workers can scale with Cinder’s application needs.

This flexibility has become a driver of innovation at Cinder. “We rely on Cloudflare Workers for critical parts of the Cinder product. It allows for incredible experimentation on the engineering team,” says Cummings. “For example, engineers use it during hackathons to experiment and roll out new features in minutes.”

“It's something that the whole team is familiar with, and we rely on other services like zero trust to ensure that when we do set up new applications using Cloudflare Workers, we're protected and we have security from the beginning.”

Automating fraud detection in job applications

Cinder also uses Cloudflare Workers to address what was a significant pain point in the screening of job applicants. As the company grew, recruiters were spending up to 80% of their time sorting through fraudulent applications, often from North Korean applicants.

Cinder was able to automate applicant verification at scale by using Cloudflare Workers to connect third-party data sources and feed signals into their own no-code workflow orchestration tool. This approach helped identify over 10,000 fraudulent applications and eliminated manual review bottlenecks — so that recruiters could focus solely on reviewing applications from qualified and verified candidates. “This has been incredibly powerful for us,” says Cummings. “It’s allowing us to meet our hiring goals.”

What’s next: Expanding securely across regions and use cases

As Cinder grows, the company expects to handle even more sensitive data, expand into new regions, and meet evolving data residency and compliance requirements. Cloudflare remains a key partner in that journey, providing a scalable foundation for secure innovation and global growth.

“Cloudflare has been an incredible partner that’s allowed us to grow seamlessly, improve our systems, and serve more customers in more regions,” says Cummings.