Render Raises $20M Series A to Meet Accelerating Demand for Big 3 Cloud Alternatives

Render announced the close of its $20M Series A investment round led by Addition, with participation from existing investors General Catalyst and the South Park Commons. This brings Render’s total funding to $26.75M.

Render offers a Zero DevOps Cloud Platform to developers and companies like Anker, Cypress.io, and Clearbit, helping customers avoid overly-complex cloud offerings and wasteful DevOps spending, and enabling them to build better products faster. The platform allows for instant setup and usability, along with the customization and flexibility of containerization technology so that teams can focus on product development instead of server management. While the Big 3 cloud offerings require expensive and scarce DevOps resources to manage, Render offers simplicity and ease, at a fraction of the cost. 

With tens of thousands of developers and businesses on the platform, serving four billion requests a month, Render’s technology is particularly crucial for startups attempting to circumvent the rising costs of DevOps talent – which often cost more than the cloud services they manage. Last year, U.S. businesses spent $78 billion on DevOps salaries, over $13 billion more than the worldwide spend on public cloud providers ($65 billion). 

“We’ve built a cloud platform from the ground up and are already pulling ahead of providers that have been around for 15 years, due to our focus on modern app development, our ability to quickly adapt to market trends, and our inherent understanding of developers wants and needs,” said Anurag Goel, CEO of Render. “From helping startups kick-start their DevOps journey to empowering large teams to automate Day 2 operations and gain insight into their infrastructure, Render is focused on delivering on an ambitious product roadmap and cementing our place as the platform of choice for developers and cloud-native businesses alike.”

The Series A funding will help to expand Render’s employee base by 3X by the end of next year, with a focus on product and business growth. Responding to users’ biggest request to improve end-user latency in more geographic regions, Render will use the investment to expand data center presence in both the U.S. and EMEA, while also launching hosting regions in APAC. 

“Render allows companies to optimize two crucial and ever-competing resources – time and talent – in a way that empowers them to ship better products faster with the control and customization that successful businesses need,” said Lee Fixel, Founder, Addition. “We’re excited to support Render as they continue to eliminate wasteful DevOps spending and improve the developer experience.”

“As our team grew to more than 20 developers, Heroku became too limiting and expensive,” said Graham Melcher, co-founder and CTO of Hint Health, a leading provider of primary care management software. “But AWS did not have the features we needed and we didn’t want to sacrifice product engineering bandwidth to work on managing infrastructure on AWS. Our developers are incredibly picky when it comes to cloud infrastructure, and Render checked all the boxes for us.”

The funding will also support Render adding new, free offerings to its platform. Designed for smaller projects and proofs of concept, the free offerings will allow individual developers and hobbyists to utilize the ease and convenience of the platform which can scale as their needs evolve.