RunPod nabs $20M to help developers launch AI apps in the cloud – Business

RunPod Inc., a cloud provider that helps developers deploy custom full-stack artificial intelligence applications, today announced that it raised $20 million in seed funding to scale its operations and bring in new partnerships.

The company’s seed round was co-led by Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital with participation from Julien Chaummond, Nat Friedman and Adam Lewis. As part of the financing, Mark Rostick, vice president and senior managing director at Intel Capital, will join RunPod’s board of directors.

RunPod uses its globally distributed cloud of graphical processing units to provide compute services to give developers the power to train, deploy and scale AI models anywhere in the world. The company has two core products: GPU Cloud and Serverless. Using either developers can spin up on-demand GPU instances and immediately create application programming interfaces for AI models in production.

Developers can access thousands of GPUs across more than 30 regions. RunPod offers the ability to deploy any container in its secure cloud, supporting public and private repos and environment customization. Users can choose from over 50 templates out-of-the-box for AI workloads to get set up with PyTorch, Tensorflow, or any preconfigured environment for machine learning – or bring their own custom containers.

Most of the time, developers don’t need a fancy interface, they just want something that they can set and go and RunPod provides that interface where they want it and how they want it. The system also autoscales to their needs. According to the company, the system makes it simple for developers to spin up an instance so that they can run any GPU workload, focus more on their work, worry less about the infrastructure and pay more attention to their development process.

“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 chief executive 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 company recently launched the ability to deploy central processing unit compute instances, which will allow developers to handle both GPU and CPU instances depending on the type of workloads they need for their projects. The startup called this a “huge milestone in creating a holistic cloud solution.”

“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.”

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