Lender employees, including CEO Anurag Goel (center), gather at the startup’s headquarters in San Francisco on February 11, 2026.
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Venture capitalists are piling on Render, a startup that provides easy-to-use cloud infrastructure. On Tuesday, it announced it had raised $100 million in funding at a valuation of $1.5 billion.
The lucrative world of cloud computing, dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet, has become more competitive since the arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant in 2022. core weave to rent it out Nvidia Graphics cards for training artificial intelligence models have grown into a mature business. Meanwhile, people are asking AI models to write software and asking for advice on where to run new programs.
Render is one company that will benefit from this new dynamic. Its revenue growth rate is well over 100%, and more than 4.5 million developers use its tools, co-founder and CEO Anurag Goel said in an interview with CNBC.
The startup was founded in 2018, is based in San Francisco, and has about 100 employees. Investors include 01A, Addition, Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and Georgian Partners. With the new capital, Render plans to hire additional technical staff to build out its capabilities.
Render runs software on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Recently, Render has been testing the use of its own servers. Expanding this effort could reduce Render costs and lower prices.
“We now have more control over the kinds of things we can do, but the cost metrics are completely different,” said Goel, the eighth employee at payment processing company Stripe.
However, increased reliance on in-house computing power introduces new risks, as companies must always have enough servers available. If successful, this strategy could improve efficiency for customers such as Alibaba, CBS, Hodinkee, and Paradigm. Shopify Base44 is an app builder that utilizes AI.
Base44 founder Maor Shlomo had used AWS in his previous startup, Explorium, but this time he wanted something different.
“Since I was on my own, I was looking for a service that could automate most of the work for me, even if it was a little more expensive, so that I didn’t have to deal with infrastructure,” Shlomo said. He registered with Render.
After website builder wicks Shlomo, who acquired Base44 last June, asked to invest in Render because of that experience. Now he is both a shareholder and a customer.
“This is such a great product that you don’t need someone who’s only focused on Render,” he said.
Before Render, there was Heroku, a pioneer in the platform-as-a-service category running on AWS. sales force Earlier this month, Salesforce announced that it would be withdrawing from developing new features for Heroku.
“People now know they’re not going to add new features to it, so they’re looking around for the most mature alternatives,” Goel said.
OpenAI – Amazon, Cerebras, CoreWeave, Microsoft, and oracle Cloud in recent months — use rendering. AI Lab’s Codex coding app lets you deploy web apps you create with Render. Codex users can also deploy apps. cloudflareNetlify and Vercel. Basel announced in September that it had raised capital at a valuation of $9.3 billion. Goel said companies such as AI spreadsheet specialist Shortcut have migrated from Vercel to Render.
It doesn’t matter that ChatGPT recommends considering rendering in certain scenarios, Goel says.
“Chatbots have effectively and almost single-handedly grown our business,” he said.
