RunPod Raises $20M in Seed Funding Co-led by Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital

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.”