7 ms·

Render Raises $50M Series B

97 points by colesantiago 3y ago

dreadlordbone 3y ago
When I first saw this on twitter, I thought Render was a cloud GPU company.
- uLogMicheal 3y ago
  There is a token named Render token for distributed rendering, created by the GPU rendering company OTOY. As far as I know they had the name first?
Sytten 3y ago
I knew when I got hit with the per seat pricing change a few months ago that there were preparing a raise and needed to get those numbers up. Good for them I guess. Funny enough I had big VC call me for due diligence (because I posted a lot on their forums and they spotted my name) and I happily told them how pissed I was with that change and how I went from vocal evangelist for the platform to looking for an alternative.
- sergiotapia 3y ago
  That change really sat poorly with me as well. My brother and I have a small pet project that makes zero dollars but we would have had to pay $50/month just to allow him access to the project on Render. Still not as _terrible_ as Vercel which straight up doesn't deploy if the user isn't a paid org member lol. Now that is shameful as shit! But this pricing change from Render was bad yeah. :(
  - Sytten 3y ago
    I mean I would have accepted it if they had network separation for various environments managed by the same team, but they DON'T (anyone telling you its fine to deploy staging in the same network as prod should be fired IMO). So you have to use different teams and pay X times the seat pricing which is ridiculous.
    - anurag 3y ago
      Network separation within the same team is on our near-term list.
swyx 3y ago
huge congrats to the Render team! especially raising a big round at a time when many VC insiders are saying things like the "series B and above market is closed". I particularly remember the mad flurry by "cloud distro" startups to capitalize on Heroku essentially shutting down their free tier last year. It's an infrequent thing but I think having a playbook for how to respond when a major competitor churns up their own users on a silver platter is super helpful for future reference. anything you'd call out as particularly helpful to you in the "post heroku wars" period? looking for specific principles i can extrapolate to other similar situations
- MikeTheRocker 3y ago
  I'm loving this post Heroku era of cloud. So exciting!
  - swyx 3y ago
    i mean its also particularly churny. there's no "one standard way to do things" anymore. every framework/open source app launch now has to include instructions for like 4 different deploy targets because people can barely even standardize on helm charts much less how to orchestrate containers without k8s/docker compose (every newroku startup seems to want to reinvent the docker compose file, render included) not complaining, innovation is good etc, but it doesnt come with out its costs to DX
- anurag 3y ago
  no magic sauce; the most helpful thing was just staying up despite the massive influx of users and getting even better at fighting platform abuse. This may be very specific to what we do as a cloud provider.
pirsquare 3y ago
FWIW Render is moving most of their infrastructure from GCP to AWS https://twitter.com/anuraggoel/status/1670863526272077825 https://twitter.com/anuraggoel/status/1670863526272077825
- verdverm 3y ago
  We left AWS for a similar reason and more. The grass always looks greener on the other side, especially when you are mad.
- paulgb 3y ago
  Hard to blame them. Google shutting down Domains, instead of rolling it into Cloud Domains, seems like a harbinger of what they’re planning for Cloud. Why offload it when they have a natural product to put it under, unless they’re also planning to shut down that product?
- anurag 3y ago
  (Render CEO) We're going to be hybrid and multi-cloud for the foreseeable future. We're reducing our reliance on GCP for some things, but I don't expect us to ever be AWS-only.
  - fakedang 3y ago
    Hey Anurag! Thanks for answering our questions here. Just curious, why do most of the new PaaSs (including Render apparently) go for GCP and AWS, instead of a cheaper option like Hetzner? It seems everyday I read another blog post of how switching away from the Big 3 Clouds (or DO) results in massive savings for some company.
    - anurag 3y ago
      Larger platforms have more underlying primitives platforms like Render can use (instances types, networking options, data storage options, regions, etc). A PaaS (depending on scope) can easily be the most complicated thing to build in the cloud, so the more building blocks you have, the better.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
normanvalentine 3y ago
Anyone have a sense of their revenue/valuation? Would be interesting to get a calibration as we've seen relatively fewer raises lately.
anurag 3y ago
Hi folks, I'm the founder and CEO at Render. With this raise, the company is doubling down on making the cloud delightful for growing software teams who don't want to think about infrastructure. We're looking for great people to join our team! See render.com/careers for all open roles.
- mr90210 3y ago
  Congrats on the effort you and your company have been putting on Render. Good luck
- schreiaj 3y ago
  First off, congrats. Second, have you guys had a chance to revise your hiring pipeline? When I spoke to your recruitment team a bit over a year ago they were asking for 8 straight hours on a zoom call as part of the software engineering interview. I had to drop out of the process because fitting that in was exceptionally difficult. (They did offer to split it into 5 and 3 but I still couldn't fit that in). They remarked they were looking to update that process a bit. The above aside - I remember thinking everyone I spoke to there was pleasant and enjoyed working there. I was sad to have to drop out. Best of luck moving forward.
  - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
    > 8 straight hours on a zoom call I know this is my entitled Big Tech worker bias, but... surely there should be a lunch break?
    - schreiaj 3y ago
      Not mentioned in the emails I had. They did suggest splitting it into 5 and 3 hour chunks but I couldn't fit it into my schedule (between work and my other half's health issues, I had to move around a lot due to several days of ER visits)
      - umach 3y ago
        I lead the engineering team and we've reworked our interview process a lot in the last year - it's much shorter and can still be split into multiple days. In addition, we are very aware that everyone has different personal constraints and we do our best to accommodate them. Please just let us know and we can likely make it happen.
MH15 3y ago
What's the meaning behind the name "Render"? I've a background in graphics tech so to me render is rendering pixels, something that Render does not do.
- purvagujar 3y ago
  verb: (1) Provide or give (a service, help, etc.); (2) Cause to be or become; make.
- sen 3y ago
  A company can “render a service” to someone. It’s not commonly used in English anymore but it’s definitely valid.
dopeboy 3y ago
Power Render user for 18 months now. We are a fan. Congrats Anurag and team.
satvikpendem 3y ago
I don't understand how any of these cloud wrapper companies will make their VC money back. Doesn't Vercel only have ~$25 million in ARR yet is somehow valued at $2.5 billion [0]? If a company is using Vercel to start up, they're pretty good for what you get, but eventually AWS (which Vercel wraps) will win out in pricing, even counting hiring devops/cloud/backend engineers. [0] https://getlatka.com/companies/vercel https://getlatka.com/companies/vercel
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  A way out for them would be to run their own infrastructure down the line which would allow them to pocket the (insane) margins the cloud providers currently make.
- swyx 3y ago
  latka is crap seo bloatsite. google should ban them. rauchg disclosed their revenue trends recently https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1667995063216148480 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1667995063216148480 i learned later that this interview was done in nov 2022
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Looks like I can't see the tweet? Also, this lines up with Latka's figures as well, $24 million in 2022, and even with $50 million in 2023, that's still quite low for a $2.5 billion valuation, and that's if they don't raise further, thereby increasing their valuation.
Tade0 3y ago
I was always of the impression that this is an extremely crowded space. What does Render bring to the table that's new?
- franciscop 3y ago
  This feels like an extremely _sparse_ space as a user. There was Heroku, which was the undisputed hero when launched and for many years, until they got acquired and things started going down and down. Then currently AFAIK there's Fly and Render, and very few alternatives. AWS/GCS is not in the same space, they are a lot lower level. For someone like me I'd hate having to move to AWS/GCS, I just want to code my project locally, git push and it's live, no fumble with devops stuff. Also Firebase etc is a bit too high level for what I like, I still like to build the project locally and have it run on my computer fully.
  - joshmanders 3y ago
    > until they got acquired and things started going down and down. In Heroku's defense, much of what we know and love them for was started before Salesforce acquired them, but then was accelerated and launched while under Salesforce. They just got very stagnant after a while and focused more on Salesforce integrations and that lately.
- sergiotapia 3y ago
  It's not crowded at all. There's four big kahunas I see competing: - Render - Railway - Northflank - Fly From easiest to hardest, in the sense of Heroku like to AWS like, I would scale them like so: Heroku------------------------------AWS Render Railway Northflank Fly Render is definitely the easiest, most friendly and predictable of the four.
  - ksajadi 3y ago
    Like the text based diagram, clever! I'd place Cloud 66 in the middle.
  - cpursley 3y ago
nickromano 3y ago
I migrated from Heroku to Render for a small Django project of mine: https://pinnacleclimb.com/ https://pinnacleclimb.com/ Some things I like about Render vs Heroku since switching: - Building the container from the Dockerfile in my repo seems to be a lot faster because it keeps all of the image layers cached. - I can control the external IPs that have access to my postgres database. I usually keep them all off and only let the webapp access it internally, and then whitelist an IP as needed. - Env groups are nice - if I want to start another service I can have it use all the same environment variables vs trying to keep them in sync myself. A couple of years ago they had some multi-hour outages but things have been pretty stable since, a couple of the multi-minute outages were on me as I was upgrading the database or messing around with some configs. https://status.pinnacleclimb.com/ https://status.pinnacleclimb.com/ One thing I'd love in the future is some sort of postgres upgrade button. They handle minor version updates but to do a major version I need to put the app in maintenance mode, dump, restore, and swap to the new DB. It would be amazing if that could be automated with something like pglogical.
villgax 3y ago
I'd rather stay with Supabase+Hugging Face API endpoints or just straight up raw dog it with DO/Lambda/Banana.dev
- gardnr 3y ago
  It looks economical to raw dog it with banana.dev: $.00207968/second for a 40GB A100.
ygouzerh 3y ago
It seems quite interesting. I would have definitely proposed it to my company, but unfortunately the per-seat pricing is a no-go for us. We are having flexible teams, and we often change people per project or hire from contractors so the user management can quickly become a mess on per-seat projects. We will end-up creating some shared accounts to save on costs, and it will become messy to manage, some people will be denied access,... so unfortunately we will need to pass.
drumhead 3y ago
>delightful Im seeing a lot of startups using this word, why?? It sounds silly, like you're selling me a childrens toy? You're not delightful, its not a 50's musical number. Its just the word dejour.
ksajadi 3y ago
When I hear about a raise, especially this large, my initial thoughts are, "great! they must be doing something right", then I remember all those startups that raised mega rounds and ended up selling me as a customer down the river, either by the way of selling to someone like Google and writing an "amazing journey" blog post or just lock me in and jack up prices (I'm looking at you Customer.io). That's why I always look for profitable companies that have built a business around solid foundations rather than raising external capital in round B, C, D all the way to Z. If you want to see how those companies *really* were doing, look at their stock prices after they go public. Very few go up or even stay flat. Most of them crash right after the stock handcuffs come off and the investors have passed the bucket to the general public. I even have an anti-portfolio of public companies with investors who wouldn't shut up for a minute about how amazing they are doing, when they were private companies. All of them have done considerably worse than the market average or any basket of tech companies, even excluding the big five.
- ergocoder 3y ago
  Raising during this downturn time on a business that is not AI nor crypto is fairly amazing though.
mtkd 3y ago
Have used Render for a few months to run some heavy worker scripts I wanted to place quickly -- it's a solid service but some of the UX is a bit rough and nearest DC to UK is Frankfurt although that turned out to not be an issue There is a lot they are getting right
theappsecguy 3y ago
I loved tender initially, but the recent price increase pushed me to move away from it. I think the platform is good, but prices are steep. Does anyone use Render at scale? I image the bills are hefty.

97 points by colesantiago 3y ago

dreadlordbone 3y ago

When I first saw this on twitter, I thought Render was a cloud GPU company.

uLogMicheal 3y ago
There is a token named Render token for distributed rendering, created by the GPU rendering company OTOY. As far as I know they had the name first?

Sytten 3y ago

I knew when I got hit with the per seat pricing change a few months ago that there were preparing a raise and needed to get those numbers up. Good for them I guess. Funny enough I had big VC call me for due diligence (because I posted a lot on their forums and they spotted my name) and I happily told them how pissed I was with that change and how I went from vocal evangelist for the platform to looking for an alternative.

sergiotapia 3y ago
That change really sat poorly with me as well. My brother and I have a small pet project that makes zero dollars but we would have had to pay $50/month just to allow him access to the project on Render. Still not as _terrible_ as Vercel which straight up doesn't deploy if the user isn't a paid org member lol. Now that is shameful as shit! But this pricing change from Render was bad yeah. :(
- Sytten 3y ago
  I mean I would have accepted it if they had network separation for various environments managed by the same team, but they DON'T (anyone telling you its fine to deploy staging in the same network as prod should be fired IMO). So you have to use different teams and pay X times the seat pricing which is ridiculous.
  - anurag 3y ago
    Network separation within the same team is on our near-term list.

swyx 3y ago

huge congrats to the Render team! especially raising a big round at a time when many VC insiders are saying things like the "series B and above market is closed". I particularly remember the mad flurry by "cloud distro" startups to capitalize on Heroku essentially shutting down their free tier last year. It's an infrequent thing but I think having a playbook for how to respond when a major competitor churns up their own users on a silver platter is super helpful for future reference. anything you'd call out as particularly helpful to you in the "post heroku wars" period? looking for specific principles i can extrapolate to other similar situations

MikeTheRocker 3y ago
I'm loving this post Heroku era of cloud. So exciting!
- swyx 3y ago
  i mean its also particularly churny. there's no "one standard way to do things" anymore. every framework/open source app launch now has to include instructions for like 4 different deploy targets because people can barely even standardize on helm charts much less how to orchestrate containers without k8s/docker compose (every newroku startup seems to want to reinvent the docker compose file, render included) not complaining, innovation is good etc, but it doesnt come with out its costs to DX
anurag 3y ago
no magic sauce; the most helpful thing was just staying up despite the massive influx of users and getting even better at fighting platform abuse. This may be very specific to what we do as a cloud provider.

pirsquare 3y ago

FWIW Render is moving most of their infrastructure from GCP to AWS https://twitter.com/anuraggoel/status/1670863526272077825 https://twitter.com/anuraggoel/status/1670863526272077825

verdverm 3y ago
We left AWS for a similar reason and more. The grass always looks greener on the other side, especially when you are mad.
paulgb 3y ago
Hard to blame them. Google shutting down Domains, instead of rolling it into Cloud Domains, seems like a harbinger of what they’re planning for Cloud. Why offload it when they have a natural product to put it under, unless they’re also planning to shut down that product?
anurag 3y ago
(Render CEO) We're going to be hybrid and multi-cloud for the foreseeable future. We're reducing our reliance on GCP for some things, but I don't expect us to ever be AWS-only.
- fakedang 3y ago
  Hey Anurag! Thanks for answering our questions here. Just curious, why do most of the new PaaSs (including Render apparently) go for GCP and AWS, instead of a cheaper option like Hetzner? It seems everyday I read another blog post of how switching away from the Big 3 Clouds (or DO) results in massive savings for some company.
  - anurag 3y ago
    Larger platforms have more underlying primitives platforms like Render can use (instances types, networking options, data storage options, regions, etc). A PaaS (depending on scope) can easily be the most complicated thing to build in the cloud, so the more building blocks you have, the better.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

normanvalentine 3y ago

Anyone have a sense of their revenue/valuation? Would be interesting to get a calibration as we've seen relatively fewer raises lately.

anurag 3y ago

Hi folks, I'm the founder and CEO at Render. With this raise, the company is doubling down on making the cloud delightful for growing software teams who don't want to think about infrastructure. We're looking for great people to join our team! See render.com/careers for all open roles.

mr90210 3y ago
Congrats on the effort you and your company have been putting on Render. Good luck
schreiaj 3y ago
First off, congrats. Second, have you guys had a chance to revise your hiring pipeline? When I spoke to your recruitment team a bit over a year ago they were asking for 8 straight hours on a zoom call as part of the software engineering interview. I had to drop out of the process because fitting that in was exceptionally difficult. (They did offer to split it into 5 and 3 but I still couldn't fit that in). They remarked they were looking to update that process a bit. The above aside - I remember thinking everyone I spoke to there was pleasant and enjoyed working there. I was sad to have to drop out. Best of luck moving forward.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
  > 8 straight hours on a zoom call I know this is my entitled Big Tech worker bias, but... surely there should be a lunch break?
  - schreiaj 3y ago
    Not mentioned in the emails I had. They did suggest splitting it into 5 and 3 hour chunks but I couldn't fit it into my schedule (between work and my other half's health issues, I had to move around a lot due to several days of ER visits)
    - umach 3y ago
      I lead the engineering team and we've reworked our interview process a lot in the last year - it's much shorter and can still be split into multiple days. In addition, we are very aware that everyone has different personal constraints and we do our best to accommodate them. Please just let us know and we can likely make it happen.

MH15 3y ago

What's the meaning behind the name "Render"? I've a background in graphics tech so to me render is rendering pixels, something that Render does not do.

purvagujar 3y ago
verb: (1) Provide or give (a service, help, etc.); (2) Cause to be or become; make.
sen 3y ago
A company can “render a service” to someone. It’s not commonly used in English anymore but it’s definitely valid.

dopeboy 3y ago

Power Render user for 18 months now. We are a fan. Congrats Anurag and team.

satvikpendem 3y ago

I don't understand how any of these cloud wrapper companies will make their VC money back. Doesn't Vercel only have ~$25 million in ARR yet is somehow valued at $2.5 billion [0]? If a company is using Vercel to start up, they're pretty good for what you get, but eventually AWS (which Vercel wraps) will win out in pricing, even counting hiring devops/cloud/backend engineers. [0] https://getlatka.com/companies/vercel https://getlatka.com/companies/vercel

Nextgrid 3y ago
A way out for them would be to run their own infrastructure down the line which would allow them to pocket the (insane) margins the cloud providers currently make.
swyx 3y ago
latka is crap seo bloatsite. google should ban them. rauchg disclosed their revenue trends recently https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1667995063216148480 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1667995063216148480 i learned later that this interview was done in nov 2022
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Looks like I can't see the tweet? Also, this lines up with Latka's figures as well, $24 million in 2022, and even with $50 million in 2023, that's still quite low for a $2.5 billion valuation, and that's if they don't raise further, thereby increasing their valuation.

Tade0 3y ago

I was always of the impression that this is an extremely crowded space. What does Render bring to the table that's new?

franciscop 3y ago
This feels like an extremely _sparse_ space as a user. There was Heroku, which was the undisputed hero when launched and for many years, until they got acquired and things started going down and down. Then currently AFAIK there's Fly and Render, and very few alternatives. AWS/GCS is not in the same space, they are a lot lower level. For someone like me I'd hate having to move to AWS/GCS, I just want to code my project locally, git push and it's live, no fumble with devops stuff. Also Firebase etc is a bit too high level for what I like, I still like to build the project locally and have it run on my computer fully.
- joshmanders 3y ago
  > until they got acquired and things started going down and down. In Heroku's defense, much of what we know and love them for was started before Salesforce acquired them, but then was accelerated and launched while under Salesforce. They just got very stagnant after a while and focused more on Salesforce integrations and that lately.
sergiotapia 3y ago
It's not crowded at all. There's four big kahunas I see competing: - Render - Railway - Northflank - Fly From easiest to hardest, in the sense of Heroku like to AWS like, I would scale them like so: Heroku------------------------------AWS Render Railway Northflank Fly Render is definitely the easiest, most friendly and predictable of the four.
- ksajadi 3y ago
  Like the text based diagram, clever! I'd place Cloud 66 in the middle.
- cpursley 3y ago

nickromano 3y ago

I migrated from Heroku to Render for a small Django project of mine: https://pinnacleclimb.com/ https://pinnacleclimb.com/ Some things I like about Render vs Heroku since switching: - Building the container from the Dockerfile in my repo seems to be a lot faster because it keeps all of the image layers cached. - I can control the external IPs that have access to my postgres database. I usually keep them all off and only let the webapp access it internally, and then whitelist an IP as needed. - Env groups are nice - if I want to start another service I can have it use all the same environment variables vs trying to keep them in sync myself. A couple of years ago they had some multi-hour outages but things have been pretty stable since, a couple of the multi-minute outages were on me as I was upgrading the database or messing around with some configs. https://status.pinnacleclimb.com/ https://status.pinnacleclimb.com/ One thing I'd love in the future is some sort of postgres upgrade button. They handle minor version updates but to do a major version I need to put the app in maintenance mode, dump, restore, and swap to the new DB. It would be amazing if that could be automated with something like pglogical.

villgax 3y ago

I'd rather stay with Supabase+Hugging Face API endpoints or just straight up raw dog it with DO/Lambda/Banana.dev

gardnr 3y ago
It looks economical to raw dog it with banana.dev: $.00207968/second for a 40GB A100.

ygouzerh 3y ago

It seems quite interesting. I would have definitely proposed it to my company, but unfortunately the per-seat pricing is a no-go for us. We are having flexible teams, and we often change people per project or hire from contractors so the user management can quickly become a mess on per-seat projects. We will end-up creating some shared accounts to save on costs, and it will become messy to manage, some people will be denied access,... so unfortunately we will need to pass.

drumhead 3y ago

>delightful Im seeing a lot of startups using this word, why?? It sounds silly, like you're selling me a childrens toy? You're not delightful, its not a 50's musical number. Its just the word dejour.

ksajadi 3y ago

When I hear about a raise, especially this large, my initial thoughts are, "great! they must be doing something right", then I remember all those startups that raised mega rounds and ended up selling me as a customer down the river, either by the way of selling to someone like Google and writing an "amazing journey" blog post or just lock me in and jack up prices (I'm looking at you Customer.io). That's why I always look for profitable companies that have built a business around solid foundations rather than raising external capital in round B, C, D all the way to Z. If you want to see how those companies *really* were doing, look at their stock prices after they go public. Very few go up or even stay flat. Most of them crash right after the stock handcuffs come off and the investors have passed the bucket to the general public. I even have an anti-portfolio of public companies with investors who wouldn't shut up for a minute about how amazing they are doing, when they were private companies. All of them have done considerably worse than the market average or any basket of tech companies, even excluding the big five.

ergocoder 3y ago
Raising during this downturn time on a business that is not AI nor crypto is fairly amazing though.

mtkd 3y ago

Have used Render for a few months to run some heavy worker scripts I wanted to place quickly -- it's a solid service but some of the UX is a bit rough and nearest DC to UK is Frankfurt although that turned out to not be an issue There is a lot they are getting right

theappsecguy 3y ago

I loved tender initially, but the recent price increase pushed me to move away from it. I think the platform is good, but prices are steep. Does anyone use Render at scale? I image the bills are hefty.