Render Scores $80 Million To Make Cloud Easier
Cloud application platform provider Render has scored $80 million in Series C funding, in a move that highlights the growing popularity of development alternatives to the cloud hyperscalers as well as expensive cloud platforms such as VMware.
Founded in 2018 by Anurag Goel (ex-Crestle, Stripe), Render offers a cloud development environment that includes cloud hosting for applications and websites with free SSL certificates, a global content delivery network (CDN), private networking, and auto deploys from Git. The competitive advantage, Render says, is the ability to create applications without having to worry about complex underlying infrastructure.
I met with Goel at the AWS re:Invent in early December, 2024 in Las Vegas. He told me that with hundreds of thousands of applications being built every month, existing frameworks for building and hosting cloud applications are too complex. The goal of Render is to further abstract the process of building cloud applications so that engineers and business managers don't have to configure or manage as many details.
"AWS has low-level primitives, they are very good at building out datacenter and services that do specific things," said Goel. "They are not focused [enabling] a customer to integrate things in a way that does not need you to understand how it all works. We are raising the abstraction level of the cloud."
Looking for Deals from Hyperscaler Customers
Goel says that Render will make make cloud app development simpler than building in AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Salesforce Heroku, all of which offer their own development platforms.
Render comes at an interesting time. As both a development and hosting platform, Render covers a lot of bases. Following Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, there are wide reports of users grousing about price increases, and VMware's Tanzu DevOps platform has been largely seen as a disappointment. At the same time, developers are also looking for development platforms that free them from the lock-in and complexity of specific hyperscaler clouds.
The company is focused on selling to developer teams, where it thinks it can help them speed up their process. Render claims to be adding 100,000 new developers monthly, also competing with the likes of Cloudflare, Digital Ocean, Netlify, and Vercel.
Render is based on the Go coding language, which is increasingly popular with developers and considered modern. It also bases a lot of its infrastructure on Kubernetes, which is becoming a new de facto platform for running cloud apps.
According to Render, its advantages include quick and relatively easy transition from code to production, something that is validated by users on Reddit. Render maintains that Kubernetes isn’t required to scale applications, eliminating some complexity. Costs are reduced by reducing the need for specialized DevOps personnel. And Render supports a wide range of application architectures, languages, and frameworks.
What Render Offers
Render provides an array of services to enterprises looking for application and website development. Static websites (which don’t require interactive or gated content) are hosted via the vendor’s CDN, along with SSL encryption between browser and site. Dynamic web applications are also supported, with a range of templates offered to simplify development. Private services, isolated from the public internet, are facilitated as well.
One notable supporter is former Twitter (now X) CEO Dick Costolo, who made an appearance in the Render press release.
“Existing solutions either make infrastructure management more complex or they lack the flexibility required for today's applications,” said Costolo, who served six years as the CEO of Twitter before co-founding 01A, a venture and private equity consultancy that’s part of the Series C. “Render abstracts all this backend away as a concern for applications, literally making the job of cloud management obsolete and enabling companies to focus on innovation vs. infrastructure.”
One thing missing from Render’s offerings is frequent mention of AI. Along with his skepticism about the development platforms of the hyperscalers, Goel questions the ROI for AI. At AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas last month, he noted to me: “AWS announced a lot of services around AI but they lack a coherent end-to-end theme. The business value and the ROI remains unclear.” Hence, Render’s sales pitch is refreshingly free of “AI washing.”
Notably, though, Render says the new funding will be used to “build AI-native capabilities,” along with increasing the company’s global footprint, adding to R&D, and expanding its enterprise feature list.
Render’s new funding was led by Georgian, with participation from 01A and avra, along with existing investors Addition, Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and the South Park Commons Fund. The funding brings Render’s total raised to about $157 million.
Futuriom Take: Render’s impressive new round speaks to the needs of enterprises to simplify cloud development as well as lower costs. It comes at an interesting time for cloud management, when developers are looking at faster and simpler solutions.
(Mary Jander contributed to this story.)
