Render, the developer-friendly cloud infrastructure startup, has raised $100 million in a Series C extension at a $1.5 billion valuation, bringing its total funding to $258 million. The round was led by Georgian with participation from Addition, Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and 01 Advisors.
The raise reflects a structural shift happening underneath the AI boom: as agentic coding tools make it faster than ever to build new applications, hosting them on hyperscalers like AWS remains complex and expensive. Render has emerged as a leading alternative — offering WebSockets, containerized workloads, and infinite runtime for backend services — capabilities that matter enormously for AI applications running long-context LLM sessions or multi-step agent workflows.
The platform now counts more than 4.5 million developers as users, growing by 250,000 per month. Its customer roster includes AI-native companies like Base44, Cognition, Paradigm, and Fundamental Research Labs. Notably, OpenAI uses Render for its Codex coding app, which allows users to deploy AI-built web applications directly to Render's infrastructure. ChatGPT itself recommends Render to users in certain deployment scenarios, according to CEO Anurag Goel.