AI Startup: Render Raises $100M for AI Cloud Platform

Render announced a $100M Series C extension on February 16, 2026, achieving a $1.5B valuation and bringing total funding to $258M. This follows an $80M Series C in January 2025 led by Georgian, with the latest round including Addition, Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and 01 Advisors

Render provides a cloud infrastructure platform designed to simplify the process of deploying and scaling applications. The San Francisco-based company offers a suite of services that abstracts away the complexities of managing servers, allowing developers to focus on writing code and building products rather than on infrastructure management.

The Update and Why It Matters:

The Update: The new capital will be used to expand Render's infrastructure to better support the specific needs of AI-native applications and agentic software, which often require long-running, stateful workloads that differ from traditional web applications.

Founded by Anurag Goel, Render delivers a unified cloud platform that simplifies building, deploying, and scaling full-stack applications and websites—with global CDN, DDoS protection, preview environments, private networking, and Git-triggered deployments.

“We are going through a generational shift in how developers pick cloud providers, Hyperscalers are no longer the default for teams that want to move fast. AI-assisted coding means developers can build faster than ever, and they need a cloud that can keep up. That’s what Render delivers.” says Anurag Goel, founder and CEO of Render.

Unlike frontend-limited alternatives, Render natively supports WebSockets, containerized workloads, and unlimited backend runtime. Tailored for long-running AI agents needing persistent storage and workflows, Render launched Render Workflows (early access) for orchestration.

AI gateway for model routing/cost optimization, object storage, code sandboxes, shared filesystems, and unified observability. CEO Anurag Goel emphasized ending infrastructure fragmentation for AI builders

The company is developing a unified AI application runtime, with plans to launch new services including object storage, code execution sandboxes, and a consolidated AI gateway. With over 4.5 million developers on its platform and 250,000 more joining monthly, Render is positioning itself as a key alternative to large-scale cloud providers for the rapidly growing AI development sector.

Why it Matters: Software creation has fundamentally changed in the last few months. Code is abundant, and lean teams can conceive, build, and iterate on features instantly.

But while writing code has leaped into the future, the infrastructure for shipping and scaling it remains anchored in the past. The bottleneck is no longer human imagination or typing speed; it is the labyrinth of deployment, scaling, and reliability.

The substantial investment in Render highlights a critical shift in the cloud infrastructure market, driven by the boom in AI development. As AI-assisted coding tools accelerate software creation, developers require a platform that can keep pace, simplifying the path from code to production.

Render's focus on providing an intuitive, scalable, and reliable environment for AI-native applications directly addresses the growing complexity and cost of using hyperscale providers.

This funding validates the demand for specialised cloud infrastructure that caters to the unique architectural needs of AI agents and real-time language model applications, positioning Render as a foundational layer for the next wave of software innovation.

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