Runpod, an AI app hosting platform that launched four years ago, has hit a $120 million annual revenue run rate, founders Zhen Lu and Pardeep Singh tell TechCrunch.
Their startup journey is a wild example of how if you build it well and the timing is lucky, they will definitely come.
The story includes bootstrapping their way to over $1 million in revenue; landing a $20 million seed round after VC Radhika Malik, a partner at Dell Technologies Capital, saw some Reddit posts; and gaining another key angel investor, Hugging Face co-founder Julien Chaumond, because he was using the product and reached out over the support chat, the founders tell TechCrunch.
It all began in late 2021 when the two friends, who worked together as corporate developers for Comcast, decided the hobby they were doing wasn’t fun anymore.
They had built setups of specialized computers used to generate Ethereum in their respective New Jersey basements. While they did successfully mine a bit of the cryptocurrency, it wasn’t enough to pay back their investment, they said. Plus, mining was going to end after the much-ballyhooed network upgrade called “The Merge.”
On top of that, it was “boring” after a couple of months, Lu said.
But they had talked their wives into letting them spend a good $50,000 on the hobby between them, they estimated. Lu and Singh knew that home harmony depended on finding a way to use those GPUs.
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The devs had been engaged in machine learning projects at work, so they opted to convert their mining rigs into AI servers. This was before ChatGPT, even before DALL-E 2.
As they repurposed the rigs, “We were seeing how really god-awful the software stack was for dealing with these GPUs,” Lu said. As developers, they found a problem they wanted to solve.
Runpod was born “because we felt that the actual experience of developing software on top of GPUs was just hot garbage,” Lu described.
A few months later in early 2022, they were ready to share what they had built. Runpod is a platform for hosting AI apps, emphasi …