techcrunch.com
Four years ago, two former Comcast developers, Zhen Lu and Pardeep Singh, repurposed their Ethereum mining rigs into an AI hosting platform called Runpod. Starting from their New Jersey basements with $50,000 of their own hardware, they bootstrapped their way to $1 million in revenue within nine months by posting on Reddit for beta testers.
Their luck turned into a $20 million seed round after a VC spotted their Reddit posts and Hugging Face co-founder Julien Chaumond discovered the platform via support chat. Today, Runpod hit a $120 million annual revenue run rate, serving 500,000 developers—including major clients like OpenAI and Replit. The founders aim to be the go-to platform for the next generation of AI developers.
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