Render Releases Major New Feature for Zero DevOps Cloud Hosting, Raises $4.5 Million in Funding

Render, the Zero DevOps Cloud, today announced automatic preview environments which are essential for rapid and collaborative development of modern applications. By offering this feature to its customers, Render is further solidifying its position as a Zero DevOps alternative to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, where users have to spend weeks of engineering effort to set up and maintain homegrown versions of this feature.

Render offers an innovative public cloud alternative that developers love; it gives them the best of both worlds: instant setup and incredible ease of use, coupled with the power and flexibility previously afforded only by large cloud providers. It does this by offering an intuitive hosting platform that requires zero knowledge of servers and infrastructure and combining it with powerful containerization technology which enables customization, cost reduction and reliability at scale.

The new automatic preview environments feature enables users to generate a complete replica of their production infrastructure for every pull request in their GitHub/GitLab repositories, empowering developer teams to test collaboratively with QA, product and sales teams and ship software faster and with fewer bugs.

“We started using Render to leverage their automatic preview environments feature and quickly fell in love with the platform. We not only use preview environments to review PRs with product and marketing teams before they are merged but also to reproduce and debug customer issues and to create sandboxes for our sales teams. Render enables workflows that would be too complex and time consuming to spin up ourselves and supports the pace of innovation we require to focus on delivering and fast iteration,” said Travis Cooper, Lead Software Engineer at Cypress.io, the JavaScript end-to-end testing framework company.

Render is trusted by tens of thousands of developers and teams from fast-growing tech startups like Cypress.io and Mux to popular consumer startups like Bloomscape and Zelos and established companies like 99designs and Stripe.

Anurag Goel, founder and CEO of Render, said: “Render is all about eliminating DevOps and giving control back to developers, and preview environments are a major step forward. Developers no longer need to wait for sysadmins to create testing, demo or staging environments. Instead, they can simply enable the preview environments feature on Render and generate these environments automatically and keep them updated with every commit. They can test their changes with precision and confidence, and product, marketing and sales teams can see upcoming and proposed changes in live production-like environments that can be shared with all internal and external stakeholders.”

Major Company Milestones

• April 2019 Render launched with $2.25 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst with participation from the South Park Commons Fund
• September 2019 Render competed against thousands of startups and won TechCrunch Disrupt SF’s Startup Battlefield for being the most promising early-stage and fundamentally disruptive startup
• April 2020 Render surpassed one billion HTTP requests served monthly 
• May 2020 Render launched its first hosting region in Europe which reduced network latency for users based in Europe by as much as 70 percent
• August 2020 Render began to partner with leading open source projects to launch single click deploys for its customers 

Today Render also announced $4.5 million in an extended seed funding round, bringing the total raised to $6.75 million. General Catalyst led the round, previous investor South Park Commons Fund participated as well as prominent angels including Lee Fixel, Elad Gil and GitHub CTO and former VP of Engineering at Heroku Jason Warner. 

“This latest release continues what has been a year of rapid evolution for Render’s Zero DevOps Cloud,” said Steve Herrod, Managing Director at General Catalyst. “We are proud to back the Render team and excited to see how they continue to deliver new capabilities that delight and empower developers.”