This kind of makes sense.

Cloudflare is essentially a giant membrane / shield / firewall for your website (or network).

Area 1 could be argued as roughly the same thing but for email instead.

Cloudflare is likely expanding their play into this space for their security suite offering of managing every single thing in-and-out of an organization.

Personally, I hated the idea of Area 1 and relaying all private emails through someone else. We literally, to my knowledge of how it works, have clients updating their DNS MX records to all send through Area 1 versus their own private Gmail accounts!

But now that Cloudflare is taking over I do not really mind. Trust pays off.