RunPod Raises $20M in Seed Funding Co-led by Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital
May 08 2024 - 9:07AM
Business Wire
RunPod, the first cloud provider for AI
applications, is attracting developers from across industries and
accelerating platform growth
RunPod, the launchpad that empowers developers to deploy custom
full-stack AI applications, today announced it raised $20M in Seed
funding, co-led by Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital with
participation from Julien Chaummond, Nat Friedman, and Adam Lewis.
In conjunction 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. Using RunPod’s two core
products, GPU Cloud and Serverless, developers can spin up an
on-demand GPU instance in a few clicks and create autoscaling API
endpoints for scaling inference on AI models in production.
“The ability to create and deploy AI applications at scale will
be paramount to their adoption and utilization,” said Amjad Masad,
RunPod investor. “The RunPod team has clearly prioritized the
developer experience to create an elegant solution that enables
individuals to rapidly develop custom AI apps or integrations while
also paving the way for organizations to truly deliver on the
promise of AI.”
RunPod makes it simple for developers to seamlessly run any GPU
workload, allowing them to focus less on Machine Learning
operations and more on building their applications. These
capabilities have proven advantageous to developers and resulted in
RunPod’s swift expansion with 10-fold revenue growth year over
year.
“RunPod started as a playground for developers and innovators, a
place where they went to do their research, develop and finetune
their projects; now, it boasts a community of over 100K
developers,” said Zhen Lu, co-founder and CEO of RunPod. “We’ve
grown so quickly because RunPod strikes the perfect balance between
providing developers with the freedom to launch whatever they want,
while still having the necessary infrastructure and tools in place
to assist in the customization, development, and deployment of
differentiated products.”
The emergence of AI-specific workloads has given rise to
increased computational demands. Once the go-to solution,
out-of-the-box cloud infrastructure platforms are no longer
cost-effective or fast enough to create custom-differentiated
products. With RunPod, developers can reliably and simply develop,
train, scale, and launch custom full-stack AI applications or
integrations in the cloud on a global scale.
“RunPod is rapidly growing 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’ve watched RunPod’s momentum scale from a small startup
offering individual developers an ecosystem to kickstart their
research and development to a serverless offering that allows
enterprise customers to scale their customized high-grade products
and solutions.”
Rapid growth and developer adoption created the need to grow the
team almost 10x in the past year, establishing itself as a leader
pioneering GPU AI-powered transformation. The platform has recently
launched the ability to deploy CPU compute instances, a huge
milestone in creating a holistic cloud solution. This Seed funding
will enable RunPod to enhance the day-to-day life of developers,
form new partnerships and integrations for seamless user
experiences, and offer new and existing customers the perfect
foundation for developing custom AI models.
“As the enterprise deploys more AI applications into production,
the key to their 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 are committed to keeping the dev
experience central to everything they do. That’s resulted in
overwhelmingly positive sentiment from the community and
impressive, sustained user growth.”
About RunPod:
RunPod is a globally distributed GPU cloud platform that
empowers developers to deploy custom full-stack AI applications –
simply, globally, and at scale. With RunPod’s key offerings, GPU
Instances and Serverless GPUs, developers can develop, train and
scale AI applications in one cloud within seconds. RunPod is
committed to making cloud computing accessible and affordable
without compromising features, usability, or experience. It strives
to empower individuals and enterprises with cutting-edge
technology, enabling them to unlock the potential of AI and cloud
computing. To learn more about RunPod, visit
https://www.runpod.io/
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Media Chris Love press@runpod.io