Render Raises $4.5M to Enhance DevOps Platform

Render, the victor of our Disrupt SF 2019 Startup Battlefield, has announced an additional $4.5 million in funding, increasing the company’s total seed investment to $6.75 million.

General Catalyst spearheaded this funding round, with continued support from earlier investors South Park Commons Fund and a group of individual investors including Lee Fixel, Elad Gil, and Jason Warner, the CTO of GitHub (and formerly VP of Engineering at Heroku).

The company, which positions itself as a “Zero DevOps alternative to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud,” initially secured $2.25 million in seed funding back in April 2019. Following their win at the Disrupt Battlefield, they received significant interest from potential investors. Ultimately, the team opted to accept further investment from their existing backers.

Currently, Render’s user base includes companies like Cypress.io, Mux, Bloomscape, Zelos, 99designs, and Stripe.

“Following Disrupt, we engaged in discussions with numerous parties, including a firm associated with Ashton Kutcher, who served as a judge,” explained Anurag Goel, Render’s co-founder and CEO. “We ultimately decided to pursue additional funding from our current investors, as we value our relationship with them and were able to secure favorable terms. They were all very enthusiastic about continuing their investment.”

Render distinguishes itself by delivering on the core concepts of platforms like Heroku and Google Cloud’s App Engine. Users simply specify the type of service they intend to deploy, and Render manages both the deployment process and the underlying infrastructure.

“Our clientele consists of developers who are focused on writing code. They desire a straightforward deployment process without the complexities of server management, ongoing maintenance, or reliance on DevOps teams—or, in many instances, the need to even employ DevOps teams,” Goel stated. “Skilled DevOps engineers are both costly to hire and difficult to find. Our objective is to eliminate the tasks traditionally performed by DevOps professionals across all organizations, as these tasks exhibit considerable consistency.”

Image Credits: Render

The company is introducing a new feature today: preview environments. These are temporary staging or development environments that developers can quickly create to test their code—and Render guarantees these environments will mirror the production environment (with the option to customize them as needed). Developers can then collaborate with QA, product, and sales teams to evaluate updates within this environment.

Render development teams define their infrastructure environments using a YAML file, and enabling these new preview environments is as simple as adding a flag to that file.

Image Credits: Render

“Once configured, for every pull request—thanks to our integration with GitHub and GitLab—we automatically provision a copy of that environment. This can encompass any element present in production, such as a Redis instance, a managed Postgres database, an Elasticsearch instance, or, naturally, APIs, web services, and static sites,” Goel explained. The environment is automatically updated with each code change pushed to the branch or pull request. Upon closing or merging the pull request, Render automatically terminates the environment.

The newly acquired funding will be allocated to team expansion and service development. The company anticipates raising a larger Series A round in the coming year, according to Goel.