A few hours ago, word dropped that Cloudflare bought VoidZero.
Wait. What’s a void zero?
If you’ve had anything to do with the frontend of a web application over the past half decade, you’ve probably stumbled across Vite, a build tool for the frontend.
It’s honestly a joy to use, especially in the otherwise unforgiving waters of getting some JavaScript on the internet in under a minute of build time.
“Today, Vite alone is downloaded more than 100 million times a week.”
Vite was created by Evan You in 2020. Aside from creating Vite, and having the coolest last name an English speaker could imagine, You also created Vue JS.
Some of you wonderful readers might have vague memories of me bad mouthing Vue. Well, you’re remembering wrong. My problem with Vue was that it was too good.
Back in ~2012/14, after we all decided Angular was too weird, and Backbone was too brilliant, we decided to use React. Unfortunately for You & Vue, React kinda hit the wire first.
Like so many young soldiers of those early 2010 years, I dropped all real product roadmap responsibilities and frantically rewrote my entire livelihood in React. Because it was “cool” and I wanted to continue to be employable.
Then, soon after, Vue JS started popping up. I tried to pretend it didn’t exist, actively refusing to look at it in the hopes that it would go away.
You see, this was back when writing code took time. You had to actually write it with a keyboard.
Plus, React had the backing of Facebook, then in recent years, Vercel. Both of which have done a pretty solid job of making it the go-to frontend system. Or at least making us believe that it should be.
But anyways — what’s the acquisition all about?
In You’s company post, he gives a pretty honest breakdown of how his band of merry developers worked on various things over the years and never really figured out a big revenue stream, despite getting really good at growing millions downloads.
Sure, VoidZero raised $4.6 million in their seed, then $12.5 million in their series A, but if you’ve ever been in a startup with funding like that + unlcear revenue, you’ll know how shaky that feels.
Vite indeed does make us more productive. More than once, I watched a top engineer disappear for days trying to get Webpack to do something like handle a version bump of a library we use.
And I don’t want to say that Webpack was the underlying problem. Change was the problem — we wanted to make better webapps, browsers started supporting more stuff. Webpack tried to keep up.
More importantly, every company on the planet turned into a web platform of some kind. How many billions of dollars went through our minified javascript files over the last 15 years?
Vite came at it with a new approach, on top of esbuild, and saved us all an ENORMOUS amount of thumb-twiddling time.
How many billions more will go through code built by Vite over the next 15 years?
I guess that’s what Cloudflare is wondering too.
Written on a keyboard by Kevin Doran — Jun 24, 2026
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