AI

Runpod raises $100M to build the leading cloud platform for AI developers

Artificial intelligence developer-centric cloud provider Runpod Inc. announced Tuesday it has raised $100 million in early-stage funding, pushing the valuation of the company to $1 billion.

The Series A funding, led by Summit Partners, brings the company’s total funding to $122 million across multiple rounds, including a seed round in May 2024 co-led by Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital.

The company markets itself as “the AI developer cloud,” by providing more than just hosted AI inference – what runs artificial intelligence deployed in the cloud – and giving developers the tools to experiment, train, fine-tune, deploy and scale multi-session model runs, all on one dashboard. The objective of the platform is to provide developers with everything they need to transform projects into working objectives from day one.

“The market spent the last two years narrowing to inference, but builders need more than that,” Chief Executive Zhen Lu said. “They need one place to take an idea from first experiment to production traffic, without stitching together multiple tools or waiting on a procurement cycle.”

As of today, the company has attracted more than one million developers to its platform. Runpod’s serverless platform has also served more than 20 billion inference requests since launch and the median time from sign up to activating a running workload is under an hour, more than 90 percent of deployments succeed on the first try and 80% of developers who deploy come back to build more.

Runpod said its growth reveals the need for deeper developer-centric infrastructure in an industry that continues to grow.

The company serves a wide variety of customers, including AI researchers and teams building frontier models. Deep Cogito Inc. used Runpod to iterate and scaffold its family of Cogito v1 open large language models.

“We trained Cogito v1, a family of models that outperforms size equivalent models from LLaMA and DeepSeek, in 75 days with a small team, entirely on Runpod,” said Drishan Arora, co-founder and CEO at Deep Cogito. “The ability to iterate fast on world-class GPU infrastructure without building our own cluster is a genuine competitive advantage.”

With the funding, the company said it intends to continue investing in the platform and developer experience, expand its team across engineering and developer relations and broaden global access for developers worldwide.

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