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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Their startup journey is a wild example of how if you build it well and the timing is lucky, they will definitely come.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019t fun anymore.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019t enough to pay back their investment, they said. Plus, mining was going to end after the much-ballyhooed network upgrade called \u201cThe Merge<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n On top of that, it was \u201cboring\u201d after a couple of months, Lu said.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n As they repurposed the rigs, \u201cWe were seeing how really god-awful the software stack was for dealing with these GPUs,\u201d Lu said. As developers, they found a problem they wanted to solve.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Runpod was born \u201cbecause we felt that the actual experience of developing software on top of GPUs was just hot garbage,\u201d Lu described.\u00a0<\/p>\n A few months later in early 2022, they were ready to share what they had built. Runpod is a platform for hosting AI apps, emphasizing speed, easily configured hardware (including a serverless option that automates configuration), and dev tools like APIs, command-line interfaces, and other integrations.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Back in 2021, they only had a few such integrations (like support for popular web app tool Jupyter notebooks). The next problem: finding beta testers.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAs first-time founders, we didn\u2019t really know how to market or how to do anything,\u201d Lu recalled. \u201cSo I\u2019m like, all right, let\u2019s just post on Reddit.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n So, they posted<\/a> in a couple of AI-oriented subreddits. The offer was simple: free access to their AI servers in exchange for feedback. It worked. They landed beta customers, which led to paying customers. Within nine months, they had quit their jobs and hit $1 million in revenue, they said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Bootstrapping growth<\/p>\n But that led to another problem. \u201cSix months in, business users were like, \u2018Hey, I want to actually run real business stuff on your platform. But I cannot run it on servers that are in people\u2019s basements,\u201d Lu said.\u00a0<\/p>\n It had not occurred to the New Jersey founders to raise capital from VCs. Instead they\u00a0formed revenue-share partnerships with data centers to grow capacity. But it was stressful. The founders needed to stay three steps ahead.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf we don\u2019t have the GPUs, the market sentiment, the user sentiment changes. Because when they don\u2019t see capacity from you, they go somewhere else,\u201d Singh described.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meanwhile, their user base was growing on Reddit<\/a> and Discord<\/a>, especially after ChatGPT launched.<\/p>\n VCs were also on the prowl for investments.\u00a0Malik saw them on Reddit and reached out, their first VC call. But Lu didn\u2019t know how to pitch to an investor. \u201cRadhika was super helpful, even at the first conversation,\u201d he said. She basically explained to him how a VC thinks and told him she\u2019d stay in touch.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Lu had a business to run that had to pay for itself. \u201cIt was almost two years where we really didn\u2019t have any funding,\u201d he said. So Runpod never offered a free tier. It had to at least pay for itself, even if it wasn\u2019t throwing off much profit. Unlike other AI cloud services that began as crypto miners<\/a>, these founders refused to take on debt, they said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n