DigitalOcean built a public cloud by making servers feel less like a procurement exercise and more like a developer tool. Now it is trying to carry that same clarity into the expensive, unruly business of production AI.
Render is a San Francisco-based cloud application platform that lets developers and software teams deploy web services, databases, cron jobs, and AI workloads without managing servers. Founded in 2018 by former Stripe engineer Anurag Goel, the company has grown into one of the most popular alternatives to Heroku and a default choice for AI-native startups, now valued at $1.5 billion after a $100M Series C extension in February 2026.