Case Study: AngelList defeats malicious bots and boosts performance with Cloudflare Bot Management

AngelList Defeats Bad Bots with Cloudflare

AngelList, the world’s largest startup community (including AngelList Talent, AngelList Venture, and Product Hunt), was hit by an influx of automated spambots creating fake profiles and scraping proprietary data like resumes, investor and startup profiles, and job listings. Their in‑house mitigation efforts were time‑consuming and insufficient, putting revenue, user retention, and reputation at risk.

AngelList deployed Cloudflare’s bot management without client‑side code, leveraging machine learning and behavioral analysis across 20+ million Internet properties to score requests in real time. In the first month Cloudflare issued 39 million CAPTCHAs to over 500,000 IPs with only 0.0033% false positives, allowing AngelList to accurately throttle malicious bots, reduce latency by making decisions at the edge, and integrate protection with Argo, DDoS mitigation, and Cloudflare’s IP reputation database.

AngelList

Tony Bruess

Product Engineer