RunPod, a launchpad enabling developers to deploy custom full-stack AI applications, announced it raised $20 million in seed funding, co-led by Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from Julien Chaummond, Nat Friedman, and Adam Lewis. In connection with the funding, 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. Utilizing 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.
RunPod makes it easier for developers to run any GPU workload efficiently, enabling them to focus less on Machine Learning operations and more on building their applications. And these capabilities have proven advantageous to developers and resulted in RunPod’s swift expansion with 10-fold revenue growth year over year.
The emergence of AI-specific workloads gave rise to increased computational demands. And once the go-to solution and out-of-the-box cloud infrastructure platforms are no longer cost-effective or fast enough to create custom-differentiated products. Through RunPod, developers can reliably and develop, train, scale, and launch custom full-stack AI applications or integrations in the cloud globally.
The company’s platform recently launched the ability to deploy CPU compute instances, a major milestone in creating a holistic cloud solution.
This seed funding round will enable RunPod to enhance developers’ day-to-day lives, set up new partnerships and integrations for seamless user experiences, and provide new and existing customers with a foundation for developing custom AI models.
KEY QUOTES:
“The ability to create and deploy AI applications at scale will be paramount to their adoption and utilization. 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.”
– Amjad Masad, RunPod investor
“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. 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.”
– Zhen Lu, co-founder and CEO of RunPod
“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. 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.”
– Mark Rostick, Vice President and Senior Managing Partner at Intel Capital
“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. 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.”
– Radhika Malik, Partner at Dell Technologies Capital
