RunPod, the first cloud provider for AI applications, attracts developers from various industries and accelerates the growth of the platform
RunPod, the launchpad that enables developers to build custom AI applications, announced that the company has received $20 million in seed funding from Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital with participation from Julien Chaummond, Nat Friedman and Adam Lewis. In connection with the financing, Mark Rostick, vice president and senior managing director at Intel Capital, will join RunPod’s board of directors.
RunPod is a globally distributed GPU cloud computing service for training, deploying and scaling AI models. With RunPod’s two core products, GPU Cloud and Serverless, developers can spin up an on-demand GPU instance in just a few clicks and create auto-scaling API endpoints for scaling inference on AI models in production.
“The ability to build and deploy AI applications at scale will be critical to their adoption and use,” said RunPod investor Amjad Masad. “The RunPod team has clearly prioritized developer experience to create an elegant solution that enables individuals to quickly develop custom AI apps or integrations while paving the way for companies to truly realize the promise of AI to redeem.”
RunPod makes it easy for developers to seamlessly run any GPU workload, allowing them to focus less on machine learning operations and more on developing their applications. These capabilities have proven beneficial to developers and led to RunPod’s rapid expansion with 10x annual revenue growth.
“RunPod began as a playground for developers and innovators, a place where they could research, develop and refine their projects. Today, RunPod has a community of over 100,000 developers,” said Zhen Lu, co-founder and CEO of RunPod. “We’ve grown so quickly because RunPod has found the perfect balance between the freedom for developers to launch whatever they want and the necessary infrastructure and tools to help customize, develop and deliver differentiated products.”
The emergence of AI-specific workloads has led to increased computational demands. Cloud infrastructure platforms that were once the standard solution are no longer cost-effective or fast enough to build custom products. RunPod enables developers to reliably and easily build, train, scale, and launch custom AI applications or integrations in the cloud on a global scale.
“RunPod is rapidly expanding both its customer base and revenue by offering a broad, fast and easy-to-use platform that meets the needs of developers and their model-based applications,” said Mark Rostick, vice president and senior managing partner at Intel Capital. “I have watched RunPod evolve from a small startup that provides individual developers with an ecosystem to advance their research and development to a serverless offering that enables enterprise customers to scale their customized, high-value products and solutions.”
Due to rapid growth and high developer adoption, the team has had to expand nearly 10x in the last year to establish itself as a leader in GPU AI-powered transformation. The platform recently introduced the ability to provision CPU compute instances, a major milestone in creating a holistic cloud solution. This seed funding will enable RunPod to improve developers’ everyday lives, forge new partnerships and integrations for seamless user experiences, and provide new and existing customers with the perfect foundation for developing their own AI models.
“As companies introduce more AI applications into production, the key to success is access to fast, reliable and scalable infrastructure. This is what Zhen, Pardeep and the team have built with the RunPod platform,” said Radhika Malik, Partner at Dell Technologies Capital. “They strive to put the developer experience at the heart of everything they do. This has resulted in overwhelmingly positive community sentiment and impressive, sustained user growth.”
Source: BusinessWire