A $100 million funding round values cloud infrastructure startup Render at $1.5 billion as demand for AI development tools surges.
The Series C extension, led by Georgian Partners with participation from Addition, Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and 01A, brings Render's total funding to $258 million.
More than 4.5 million developers now use the platform according to CEO Anurag Goel, with over 250,000 new users joining monthly.
Render's revenue growth exceeds 100% annually as companies rush to build AI applications following the ChatGPT breakthrough in 2022.
The San Francisco-based company plans to use the capital to expand its AI capabilities, building what it calls a "unified AI application runtime" that gives developers all necessary cloud primitives on one platform.
Thousands of AI companies including Base44, Cognition, Luminai, and Fundamental Research Labs already build on Render's infrastructure. The platform supports WebSockets and stateful applications while providing integrated tooling for orchestrating complex AI logic.
With approximately 100 employees currently, Render will hire additional technical staff to accelerate feature development.
The company also plans to launch object storage, code execution sandboxes, shared filesystems, and a consolidated AI gateway in coming months.
"We are going through a generational shift in how developers pick cloud providers," said Goel in a statement accompanying the funding announcement. "We get more control over the kinds of things we can do, but the cost basis is just very different."
Render launched in 2018 as an alternative to traditional cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure for application development teams looking to bring ideas to market faster.
