Render's $20 Million Series A

Today, we announce a new milestone in our journey to eliminate DevOps: our $20 million Series A led by Addition, with participation from existing investors General Catalyst and the South Park Commons Fund. This round brings Render’s total funding to $27 million and sets the stage for the next phase of our growth.

Along with the new funding, we are also excited to announce Free instance types for web services and PostgreSQL databases. Read on to learn more.

When I first met Lee in February 2020, he asked me two questions: first, what a typical customer pays for Render, and second, how much a typical DevOps Engineer makes. My answers made Render’s value instantly obvious to him. Our customers save both time and money running on Render, empowering them to build better products faster. The rest of our chat made it obvious to me why Lee remains one of the most successful venture investors in the world. He shares not only our relentless focus on the long term, but also our fearless determination to take on deeply entrenched incumbents in massive markets. We’re very excited to partner with Addition.

Building a new cloud platform remains one of the most ambitious and capital-intensive endeavors in the software industry. We’ve released hundreds of features and improvements since our launch in 2019, and yet we’ve only scratched the surface. Our new funding empowers us to expand and improve Render more quickly so our customers can continue to scale on our platform and avoid the complex, expensive, and time-consuming work involved in running on lower-level platforms like AWS.

Ultimately, Render is in the business of giving time back to our customers — time they can better spend investing in their people, products, and services.

This philosophy has helped us grow to tens of thousands of developers who have created more than 300,000 services on our platform, serving 4 billion requests every month. Our customers migrate to Render from providers like Heroku and AWS every day; still, we want Render to be so much more. If you’re a current or potential customer, please know that we’re paying close attention to your needs and that our sense of urgency continues undiminished. We’re planning to ship many more highly-requested features in the coming months, including:

• Managed data stores like Redis so there’s even less for you to worry about
• More hosting regions so your apps are fast no matter where your users are
• A public API, so you can program Render to your needs
• S3-compatible Object Storage, so you never have to create an AWS account
• Built-in DDoS protection, so you’re protected from a rapidly accelerating number of attacks

and many more features traditionally only available to Very Large Companies.

We’re acutely aware of the enormity of the effort it will take to fully realize Render’s vision, and we’re hiring to grow the team 3x over the next year. If you’re intrigued by the work above, take a look at our open positions and join our team of smart, kind, and committed individuals building the future of the cloud.

We are also launching Free instance types for web services and managed PostgreSQL today. These new instance types complement our existing free instance type for static sites, and make Render even more accessible to developers. A lot of our customers enjoy tinkering with new tech and building personal projects; many have tens of projects that need a place on the web. Paying $7/month for each project can quickly get expensive, and free instance types solve this problem. As a developer, you can now set up a static site, API, and database on Render all for free, and scale effortlessly as your applications grow. We can’t wait to see what you build. Try it out today!