RunPod: A Dev-first Approach to Tackling AI Workloads

Every VC loves a great founder backstory. It’s even better if it includes starting the company in a garage, dorm room, or basement. Maybe it’s a positive signal or maybe we just like a good narrative. Another thing that tends to be big with us investors is a founding team with customer empathy and a product with user love. If you can add some early revenue in there, we’re over the moon. The RunPod team is this early-stage triple threat.   

RunPod is a globally distributed AI cloud for developers who are developing and deploying AI applications. The platform boasts a community of 100K+ developers using their GPU instances and serverless endpoints.

Finding RunPod  

We discovered RunPod on Reddit in 2022 as we were doing a deep dive to learn about the new generation of AI clouds and realized a whole new wave of infrastructure startups were being built to support what is arguably the most important workload of the decade. At the time, Zhen and Pardeep had just started to move away from renting GPUs from their basements to building a globally distributed AI cloud, all this while still maintaining their full-time jobs. Developers who were fine-tuning and running Stable Diffusion models loved how easy it was to run on Runpod, organically sharing how they were using the platform, and referring other users.

Fast forward a year, Zhen and Pardeep had gone full-time on Runpod, assembled a small but mighty team, and made tremendous progress on the product. They had built out their cloud with several infrastructure partners, grown a community of 60K+ developers, and launched a serverless product to build production inference APIs at scale. All this with very little capital raised. RunPod had the basics down – the platform excels in terms of reliability, performance, and scale. The developer experience has been at the forefront from the beginning – devs love that the experience is simple yet customizable. Today, the platform continues to grow at a rapid pace, both in terms of developers and revenue.  

Why RunPod Matters Now

AI application development is at its breakout moment. The RunPod team, like so many other great developer-focused companies such as Redis, MongoDB, and MinIO, has risen to the occasion by keeping the dev at the center of every feature they build. Devs are using the platform across the AI lifecycle – building/fine-tuning models, deploying them to production, and scaling their applications. They’ve spent the time to get the fundamentals right to offer reliable, performant infrastructure that abstracts away the details and pain of underlying infrastructure management.

If we sound enthusiastic about this team, it’s because we are. And that’s why we, along with our friends at Intel Capital, have co-led their Seed round. Zhen, Pradeep, and the team have accomplished an incredible amount in such a short time. We’re in it to roll up our sleeves and help them continue to scale the company to its full potential.

Radhika Malik and Team DTC