RunPod, the launchpad that empowers developers to deploy custom full-stack AI applications, is announcing the completion of its seed funding round—co-led by Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital with participation from Julien Chaummond, Nat Friedman, and Adam Lewis—having raised $20 million. The GPU cloud computing service provider will leverage the funds to pursue new partnerships and integrations, as well as perfecting its product offering, according to the company.
As AI innovation continues to evolve, there is one constant—increased computational demands.
RunPod eases developer workloads by offering a globally distributed GPU cloud computing service for training, deploying, and scaling AI models. RunPod’s offerings—GPU Cloud and Serverless—allow developers to easily spin up an on-demand GPU instance as well as produce autoscaling API endpoints for AI model scaling inference.
By freeing up developer workloads, these personas can direct their attention more toward application innovation rather than MLOps, according to RunPod. Reliability and simplicity are key focus areas for RunPod’s solutions, ensuring that developers can develop, train, scale, and launch full-stack AI apps or integrations at cloud scale.
“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 has seen remarkable growth in its customer base, having had to increase its own team by ten times in the past year, according to the company. With the latest funding, RunPod will continue its product innovation, driven by the ambition to simplify developer operations.
“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.”
“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.”
To learn more about RunPod, please visit https://www.runpod.io/.