• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 22, 2015

Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Baidu have announced a $110 million investment in CloudFlare, a five-year old security startup. The group announced the funding round from the search and technology giants led by Fidelity on Tuesday.

CloudFlare says it will use the new funding from search engines and technology giants to accelerate the rapid customer growth it has seen in the past year, expand on products to support the demands of large enterprises, and move into new international markets. It will also focus on supporting mobile users and markets.

"In the future, mobile networks will have to deal with a thousand times more data traffic than they handle today," Matt Grob, executive vice president and CTO at Qualcomm, said in a prepared statement.

U.S. advertisers will spend $65.87 billion in mobile advertising by 2019 -- up from $28.72 billion in 2015, and $49.81 billion in 2017, estimates eMarketer. The estimate includes display, search, SMS/MMS, and other types of media such as email, lead generation and classifieds.

Grob believes CloudFlare can support this growth, increasing the security and speed of content delivered to the mobile handset.

CloudFlare already processes 5% of all Internet requests monthly, mitigating more than 200 billion cyberattacks in August alone. It supports more than four million customers in 30 countries.

The latest funding closed in December 2014, but the companies wanted to wait to announce the news until CloudFlare finalized a joint venture with Chinese Internet search engine Baidu last week. Baidu wants to bring CloudFlare's security services to China’s 650 million Internet users.