Render has raised $100 million in an extension of its Series C, valuing the company at $1.5 billion and bringing total funding to $258 million. The round was led by Georgian, which also led the original Series C, and drew significant participation from all major existing backers: Addition, Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and 01 Advisors.

The vote of confidence from existing investors speaks for itself. When a company’s backers double down at a higher valuation, it signals that internal metrics are strong. For Render, those numbers are hard to argue with: the platform now counts more than 4.5 million developers, with over 250,000 new sign-ups every month.

Why Developers Are Moving Away from Hyperscalers

The cloud infrastructure market is changing. AI-assisted coding tools have dramatically reduced the time it takes to build new applications. But writing code and deploying it are two very different challenges. Hosting on major providers like AWS remains complex, and getting a production-ready deployment out the door can take weeks, even for well-staffed engineering teams.

Render has positioned itself as the simpler, faster alternative for teams that want to skip that complexity. Its platform offers a mature set of cloud services built for full-stack application deployment, and it has become a preferred option among companies building AI-native products.

“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.”

Anurag Goel, founder and CEO of Render

Building the Infrastructure Layer for AI Applications

Render will use the new capital to expand its AI-specific infrastructure and build a unified AI application runtime that gives developers every core cloud service they need to bring AI apps and agents to production on a single platform. That includes compute, durable execution, high-speed storage, LLM orchestration, and end-to-end observability, all integrated under one roof.

The company has already launched Render Workflows in early access, a durable execution and compute engine for orchestrating complex AI application logic. In the coming months, it plans to add object storage, code execution sandboxes, shared filesystems, and a consolidated AI gateway. The goal is to give AI-native teams the integrated tooling they need to ship faster and at lower cost.

From TechCrunch Battlefield Winner to Cloud Unicorn

Render was founded by Anurag Goel and won the 2019 TechCrunch Startup Battlefield, one of the most competitive early-stage showcases in the industry. Since then, the company has grown into one of the fastest-growing cloud platforms in the world, with a developer base now surpassing 4.5 million users.

What sets Render apart from many competitors is its architecture. Unlike serverless or frontend-focused platforms, Render supports WebSockets, containerized workloads, and long-running backend processes — all essential for real-time LLM-based applications and AI agents that may need to run for hours or days at a time. That technical approach makes the platform genuinely well-suited for the demands of modern AI development.

Thousands of AI companies already build on Render, including Base44, Cognition, Luminai, Paradigm, and Fundamental Research Labs. Maor Shlomo, founder of Base44 (acquired by Wix), put it directly: “We’ve been able to deliver AI features much faster with a very lean engineering team, and Render’s flexibility and reliability have scaled to meet our rapidly evolving needs. After using their platform over the last year, I’m convinced Render is the future of the cloud. Their latest round gave me a chance to invest in their trajectory, and the opportunity was too good to pass up.”

Investors and Funding History

Georgian, the Toronto-based venture firm that led this round, invests in high-growth B2B software companies and runs an AI Lab that works directly with its portfolio. Emily Walsh, Lead Investor at Georgian, said: “We believe Render is becoming the essential infrastructure layer for the next generation of AI-native applications. Generative AI has made it faster than ever to write code, but turning AI-first and agentic systems into reliable, production-ready software remains a major challenge. Render provides the reliability, scalability, and operational primitives developers need to build and operate these systems at the speed of AI. We’re excited to deepen our partnership with Anurag and the team as they continue to define this category.”

Beyond Georgian, Render’s investor base includes Bessemer Venture Partners, Addition, General Catalyst, 01 Advisors, avra, and South Park Commons Fund. With this Series C extension bringing total funding to $258 million, Render enters its next phase with significant backing and a clear product direction in one of the fastest-moving areas of enterprise technology.

Origianl Creator: Ekaterina Pisareva
Original Link: https://justainews.com/companies/funding-news/render-raises-100m-to-build-the-cloud-for-ai-native-apps/
Originally Posted: Wed, 18 Feb 2026 05:02:39 +0000