Developer-focused cloud infrastructure startup Render Services Inc. says it’s ready to disrupt traditional giants such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp. after raising $80 million in a new round of funding.

Today’s Series C round was led by Georgian and saw participation from 01A, a new venture capital firm headed by former Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Dick Costolo, as well as Avra and existing investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst and the South Park Commons Fund.

Render is the creator of a cloud application platform that developers can use to deploy applications, services and websites on cloud infrastructure with much greater simplicity compared to traditional platforms like AWS. Among other things, Render’s cloud platform does away with the need for developers to play around with complex infrastructure configurations and settings. By elevating the abstraction layer from the virtual machine, it also automates infrastructure management chores, allowing developers to focus solely on their applications.

Essentially, what it’s offering is a more straightforward cloud experience for developers, who can focus on making sure their apps are running without any issues and have more time to create and deploy new features. To get started, developers simply connect the GitHub or GitLab repository that hosts their application code, and Render’s platform will immediately suggest commands they can implement to start running the app or adding new features.

Render founder and Chief Executive Anurag Goel told SiliconANGLE in an interview that his company’s platform is more flexible than the traditional “serverless” cloud computing infrastructure offerings found on rival platforms, able to support a much more comprehensive selection of workloads. “Serverless infrastructure rely on ephemeral functions-as-a-service, which can only run for a short period of time, with limited resources and capabilities available,” he explained.

Because of this limitation, typical serverless architectures are unable to support many of the most popular programming models, such as real-time applications with WebSockets, long-running application programming interfaces, and applications and services that run 24/7, such as databases and caches, Goel said.

“Render does not impose FaaS limitations because it supports long-running applications and processes, making it more flexible and especially suited for today’s AI-driven long-running workloads,” he explained. “We see a lot of customers migrating to us from other platforms, because they need use LLM APIs and websockets. Traditional FaaS and serverless don’t meet their needs.”

The CEO reeled off a list of other advantages Render provides, including more rapid deployment, with developers able to get their apps running in the cloud in minutes rather than days, plus the ability to scale without complexity. Render simply automates the necessary infrastructure provisioning as it’s required, without asking developers to fiddle around setting up Kubernetes or other complex environments.

What’s really impressive is that Render reckons it can do all this at a lower cost than traditional cloud platforms, with a free tier available to startups and individual developers.

“Render is cheaper when you look at the total cost of ownership, where you have to consider the salaries of DevOps engineers who manage platforms like AWS or Azure,” Goel said. “Their salaries overshadow the actual cloud bills, but our platform eliminates the need to hire so many infrastructure engineers, helping customers to save money and time.”

The CEO said today’s funding round is a key milestone for his company, marking the “beginning of the end” of cloud infrastructure management. He said he believes Render is set to become the default choice for developers and businesses looking to build and scale cloud applications because it makes it so much easier, and brushed off any suggestion that his company might end up being acquired by one of its much larger rivals.

“We’re solving a very ambitious problem,” he said. “We’re making the cloud accessible to software developers everywhere. This work is a multi-decade endeavor, and we plan to remain independent indefinitely.”

The startup has made substantial progress towards its goal, with more than 100,000 new developers joining its platform every month, driving “significant compute workload migrations” away from AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. “The surge in workload migrations validates our vision that developers should focus on building exceptional products, not wrestling with infrastructure,” Goel said.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Render is tackling a real problem for developers, as most public cloud infrastructure platforms have become incredibly complex to manage and operate.

“Infrastructure management takes up a lot of developer’s time and resources, so it’s good to see an alternative like Render, which manages to abstract much of that hassle away, making it easier to build new applications,” the analyst said. “The question for users is whether or not Render’s platform introduces a point of dependency, or even the prospect of being locked in. It’s something that developer teams will need to evaluate carefully before they commit to this, or any platform.”

The funding will help accelerate Render’s mission, which is to disrupt the $400 billion-plus cloud infrastructure market. It will do this by expanding its enterprise-focused features, adding new artificial intelligence capabilities and increasing its global footprint. It’s also planning to grow its research and development team to try and stay one step ahead of its rivals.

Costolo said he’s backing Render because its platform addresses what he believes is an enormous market opportunity to reimagine the way companies tackle the challenge of cloud infrastructure management.

“Existing solutions either make infrastructure management more complex, or they just lack the flexibility required for today’s applications,” he said. “Render abstracts all this backend away, making the job of cloud management obsolete and enabling companies to focus on innovation.”

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