Render Raises $100 Million to Build Cloud Tech for AI Agents

The firm’s Series C extension, announced Tuesday (Feb. 17), values Render at $1.5 billion and will help it build cloud runtime for artificial intelligence (AI) agents and applications.

“Traditional web apps rely on short-lived, stateless request-response cycles. AI agents are the opposite: they are long-running, stateful, and distributed,” Render said in its announcement.

“They require unbounded execution times, complex memory management, persistent file systems, and durable workflows. Building these systems on hyperscalers is complex and expensive, while frontend-focused serverless platforms are too limiting for this new execution model,” the company added.

Render said its architecture is designed to address these issues, providing what it calls a “frictionless foundation” for AI via native support for long-running processes, “private networking, WebSockets, enterprise-grade Postgres and Redis, and infrastructure-as-code.”

The company added that its work is designed to help its clients overcome “complex infrastructure sprawl,” as engineers developing  production-grade LLM applications are forced to weave together “a fragmented mess of vendors for sandboxes, vector stores, workflows, storage, and observability,” just to get a one agent up and running.

“Render is ending this fragmentation,” the company said. “We are building a fully integrated platform that enables every AI developer to bring their applications to market quickly, confidently, and at scale.”

In other AI news, recent PYMNTS Intelligence research looked at the way chief financial officers (CFOs) are using agentic artificial intelligence.

The findings show that the top use for this tech is dynamic budget reallocation based on fresh cost data. Around 43% of CFOs said they expect a high impact from using agents in some form to handle this function, with another 47% forecasting moderate impact.

“Instead of annual or quarterly budget resets, agentic AI can continuously scan real-time spending patterns, flag overruns and shift funds toward higher-priority areas, “ PYMNTS wrote. “For CFOs under pressure to do more with what they have, the promised payoff is fewer surprises, fewer fire drills and more discernment and control over how every dollar is deployed.”

The research also found that roughly a third of CFOs predicted that agentic AI will have a high impact on producing real-time forecasts and “what-if” simulations, though 40% said they saw only a moderate impact.

“Folks are just starting to understand that AI isn’t just automation with ‘kind of sexier’ marketing,” Finexio Founder and CEO Ernest Rolfson told PYMNTS in an interview late last year. “Embracing it as infrastructure lets you use your data as a strategic asset.”