# RunPod: physical AI company

Canonical ID: `2efda7c5-4395-4a15-b28d-186b295cc154`

## Key facts

- **Founded:** 2022
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, California; remote-first team across US, Canada, Europe, India
- **Founders:** [Zhen Lu](/people/zhen-lu.md) (CEO) and [Pardeep Singh](/people/pardeep-singh.md)
- **Total funding:** [$20M seed (May 2024); no priced follow-on publicly disclosed as of Aug 2026](/investors.md) ([see investors](/investors.md))
- **Lead investors:** [Intel Capital (lead); Dell Technologies Capital participated](/investors.md) ([see investors](/investors.md))
- **GPU SKUs offered:** 30+ SKUs including Nvidia B200, H200, H100 (PCIe/SXM/NVL), A100, L40S, RTX 4090; MI300X not listed on the public price sheet
- **Announced hourly pricing:** B200 $6.79/hr; H200 $4.59/hr; H100 SXM $3.29/hr; H100 PCIe $2.89/hr; A100 SXM $1.59/hr (Secure Cloud on-demand); Community Cloud roughly $1.00-$1.50/hr cheaper per SKU
- **Datacenter footprint:** ~31 global regions delivered through third-party colocation partners plus a Community Cloud marketplace of vetted third-party GPU operators; no disclosed owned campuses or MW capacity
- **Positioning:** Both training and inference, but inference/long-tail developer weighted; serverless endpoints with sub-200ms cold starts and training clusters up to 200+ GPUs on InfiniBand
- **Disclosed customers:** Cursor, Cognition, Replit, Perplexity, Hugging Face, Civit AI; company claims 1M+ developers on platform
- **Silicon partners:** Nvidia primary (full lineup through B200); AMD not on public price sheet as of Aug 2026
- **Public/private status:** Private

- **Slug:** runpod
- **Status:** active
- **Founded:** 2022
- **HQ:** San Francisco, California, USA (remote-first; original operations in Louisville, Kentucky)
- **Funding total (USD):** 20000000

## Models

_No models registered._

## Current leadership (2)

- [Zhen Lu](/people/zhen-lu.md) Co-founder & CEO (_reported, not verified_)
- [Pardeep Singh](/people/pardeep-singh.md) Co-founder (_reported, not verified_)

## Supplies to

_No verified supply relationships on file. Supply-chain coverage is being added across the registry; check back as the seed populates this company's outbound edges._

_Outbound supply edges. Each appears when verified with at least two strong sources. Sources are append-only; corrections add new sources rather than rewrite history._

## Common questions

### What is RunPod?

RunPod is a San Francisco-based GPU cloud that rents Nvidia (and, in Community Cloud form, third-party operator) accelerators by the second, positioning itself squarely at AI developers, small labs, and inference-heavy startups rather than the hyperscale training buyers courted by CoreWeave or Crusoe. The company was founded in 2022 by CEO Zhen Lu and Pardeep Singh and, unusually for the neocloud category, publishes a fixed on-demand price list for every SKU it offers, from a $0.34/hr RTX A4000 up to a $6.79/hr Nvidia B200.\n\nThe platform splits into two products that reflect its long-tail strategy. Secure Cloud runs in Tier 3/4 partner colocation facilities across roughly 31 global regions; Community Cloud is a marketplace that aggregates spare capacity from vetted third-party GPU operators at lower prices, similar in shape to Vast.ai. Serverless endpoints with sub-200ms cold starts are pitched as the inference primitive, while multi-node InfiniBand clusters up to 200+ GPUs handle fine-tuning and training. RunPod says it serves more than one million developers, with disclosed customers including Cursor, Cognition, Replit, Perplexity, Hugging Face and Civit AI.\n\nWhat makes RunPod distinctive versus the rest of the neocloud pack is that it never tried to be a hyperscaler. It raised only $20M seed capital in May 2024 (led by Intel Capital, with Dell Technologies Capital) and has, so far, chosen not to burn debt-financed capex on owned campuses; instead it composes capacity from colo partners and community operators and monetizes the software layer (per-second billing, serverless, cold-start optimization). That leaves it structurally lighter and price-transparent, but also without the multi-hundred-megawatt anchor deals that dominate the sector's disclosures.

### What does RunPod make?

RunPod has no robot models recorded on the DEPLOY registry. RunPod builds physical robots.

### Is RunPod publicly traded?

No. RunPod is privately held and not publicly traded, per the DEPLOY registry.

### How can I invest in RunPod?

RunPod is a private company; its shares are not available on public markets, so retail investors cannot buy the stock today. It has raised $20M in disclosed funding.

### Where is RunPod headquartered?

RunPod is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA (remote-first; original operations in Louisville, Kentucky).

### How much funding has RunPod raised?

RunPod has raised approximately $20M in disclosed funding on record in the DEPLOY registry.

### Who owns RunPod?

RunPod is privately held and venture-backed ($20M raised); ownership sits with its founders and private investors.

### Is RunPod a top robotics company?

On DEPLOY's intelligence score, which blends verified deployments, funding, hiring, media, safety, and IP signals, RunPod ranks in roughly the top 99% of companies tracked by the registry.

### When was RunPod founded?

RunPod was founded in 2022.


## Sources (4)

1. https://www.runpod.io/about
2. https://www.runpod.io/pricing
3. https://www.runpod.io/
4. https://www.intelcapital.com/portfolio/

## The verified answers

- [Which companies have the most robots deployed](/which-companies-have-the-most-robots-deployed.md)
- [Which operators run the most robots](/which-operators-run-the-most-robots.md)
- [Which robot operators cover the most countries](/which-robot-operators-cover-the-most-countries.md)

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