Why Georgian Invested in Render

We are pleased to announce Georgian’s investment in Render’s $80M Series C round. Founded in 2018 by Anurag Goel, Render is redefining cloud infrastructure by making it simpler for developers and companies to deploy, manage and scale their applications.

The Rise of Cloud Application Platforms

Over the past decade, we have observed that cloud platforms have grown increasingly complex, forcing companies to dedicate significant engineering resources to managing infrastructure rather than building their core products. While hyperscale cloud providers offer powerful capabilities, the growing number of services and configuration options has, in our view, created significant complexity that many organizations struggle to manage effectively.

This complexity has real costs – both in terms of dedicated DevOps headcount and reduced developer productivity as engineers context-switch between writing code and managing infrastructure. For many companies, especially those in the SMB and mid-market segments, we believe that maintaining a dedicated DevOps team to manage cloud infrastructure is no longer practical or strategic.

Render was created to address this challenge by abstracting away cloud infrastructure complexity so developers can focus on building products. The company has grown rapidly by delivering on this mission, and recently announced it had reached 2M developers leveraging the product. This growth has been driven primarily through word-of-mouth as developers experience the dramatic productivity gains enabled by Render’s platform.

Why Render Stands Out

Several aspects of Render stood out during our diligence process that led us to believe in the company’s ability to become the leading cloud platform for developers and growing companies:

• Strong Product-Led Growth: Render has built an efficient self-serve motion, driving consistent growth primarily through word-of-mouth by developers who appreciate the simplicity and elegance of Render’s product, and the reliability of their services. In our view, the company has achieved impressive year-over-year ARR growth and maintains industry-leading customer satisfaction scores while operating at healthy gross margins. 
• Clear Product Leadership: Render has established itself as a leading next-generation cloud application platform through its focus on developer experience and platform capabilities. The company has distanced itself from competitors through its reliability, mature features, including an emphasis on security, and a growing ecosystem of services. Thanks to its product innovation, Render has attracted customers from early to scale stage as well as traditional businesses launching digital products. 
• Mature Team: Led by Anurag Goel, who brings deep technical and leadership experience from scaling Stripe’s infrastructure as employee #8, Render has assembled a strong team across product and engineering. Recent key hires, from high-growth companies like Webflow, Figma and Discord, bring experience scaling high-growth software businesses. 
• Large Market Opportunity: As AI democratizes software development and cloud infrastructure grows more complex, we believe the market for simplified cloud platforms will expand significantly. Gartner estimated that the market for cloud application platforms was over $3B in 2023, and will grow at 14.4% CAGR to reach $5.4B by 2028.[1] There is an opportunity to capture workloads from legacy providers like Heroku while also serving the growing number of developers who need a simpler alternative to managing cloud infrastructure. 

The Path Forward 

In our view,  Render is well-positioned to become the default cloud platform for developers and growing companies by continuing to scale with their customers and to invest in building the simplest way for businesses of all sizes to launch applications. The company’s strong technical foundation, efficient growth motion, and clear vision for the future make us confident in their ability to capture the growing opportunity in cloud infrastructure. You can learn more about Render at render.com.

[1] Source: Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Application Platforms, November 2024