Render
A Heroku-style cloud that hosts apps, databases and now AI agents for 4.5 million developers. Valued at $1.5B in February 2026, with revenue growth its CEO puts well above 100%.
Render blog, Feb 17, 2026; CNBC, Feb 17, 2026- Valuation
- $1.5B at the $100M Series C extension in February 2026. No earlier valuation was ever disclosed.
- Raised
- $258M in total per Render, across two seed rounds and Series A, B, C and a C extension since 2019.
- Revenue
- Not published the CEO told CNBC revenue growth is well above 100%. No dollar figure has been disclosed.
- Watch
- Heroku stopped building Salesforce put Heroku into maintenance mode in Feb 2026. Render offers up to $10K of credits to movers.
- AI
- MCP server plus 20+ skills coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor and Codex can deploy, read logs and query databases on Render.
- Liquidity
- None reported no staff tender offer or secondary sale found in Render's blog or press; shares are not listed.
- Hiring
- 37 → 35 remote listings since Oct 10.
A flat monthly plan, plus pay for what you run.
Render charges a workspace fee (Hobby $0, Pro $25, Scale $499 a month, no per-seat fees since Aug 1, 2026) plus usage for compute, bandwidth over the included amount, extra domains and build minutes. It hosts web services, workers, cron jobs, Postgres and Key Value stores. It does not publish revenue or a split.
Render blog, Apr 23, 2026 (effective Aug 1, 2026)- 1A huge free-to-start developer baseOver 4.5 million developers and 250,000+ new sign-ups a month in Feb 2026, up from 2 million and 100,000 a month in Jan 2025. Render said about 400,000 join each month by June 2026.Render blog, Feb 17, 2026; Render blog, Jan 21, 2025; Jul 19, 2026
- 2Heroku ease with more kinds of computeDeploys from a GitHub repo with autoscaling and automatic rollback, and runs containers, WebSockets, workers and managed Postgres and Redis, which Render pitches as broader than serverless rivals.SiliconANGLE, Feb 17, 2026
- 3Paperwork big customers ask forRender posted SOC 2 Type II in Feb 2023, ISO 27001 in Dec 2024, HIPAA workspaces in June 2025 and SAML SSO for Enterprise in Mar 2025. Named customers include Shopify, Twilio and Tripadvisor.Render blog index, checked Nov 3, 2026; SiliconANGLE, Feb 2026
- Salesforce$189Blisted, Oct 30 close
- Vercel$9.30Bprivate, Sep 30
- Render$1.50BSeries C extension, Feb 17
Private values are the last reported round; they can be stale. Listed values are market value. Bars start at zero.
Every round, and what its terms give away.
Render is private, so there is no share price. What its investors paid, and on what terms, is the closest thing to one.
- $1.50B
- latest valuation, Series C extension Feb 17
- $258M
- raised in all
- 100
- employees, as reported
Not disclosed. The CEO told CNBC revenue growth is well above 100%.
CNBC, Feb 17, 2026; Render blog, Feb 17, 2026- Feb 17Series C extension$100M at $1.50BLed by Georgian. About 7% of the company, if all new sharesSame lead as the Series C; Addition, Bessemer, General Catalyst and 01A joined. Total raised reached $258M. Not stated whether $1.5B is pre or post money.Render blog, Feb 17, 2026
- Jan 21Series C$80MLed by GeorgianNew backers 01A (Dick Costolo's firm) and avra. Total raised reached $157M. Valuation not disclosed.Render blog, Jan 21, 2025
- Jun 20Series B$50MLed by Bessemer Venture PartnersAddition, General Catalyst and South Park Commons Fund followed. Over half a million developers then.Render blog, Jun 20, 2023
- Nov 22Series A$20MLed by AdditionTotal raised reached $27M. Render planned to triple its team in a year.Render blog, Nov 22, 2021
- Oct 22Seed extension$4.5MLed by General CatalystAngels included Elad Gil, Lee Fixel and Jason Warner (then GitHub CTO). Seed total $6.75M.TechCrunch, Oct 22, 2020
- Apr 25Seed$2.3MLed by General Catalyst and South Park Commons Fund (lead not specified)Raised at launch. Render later won Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF 2019.TechCrunch via Yahoo, Apr 25, 2019
- Down round or flat round?Cannot compare. The $1.5B in Feb 2026 is the first valuation Render has disclosed; the Series C, B and A valuations were never published.Render blog, Feb 17, 2026Open
- How much of the company the last round soldAbout 6.7%: $100M at $1.5B (closer to 6.25% if $1.5B is pre-money; Render does not say).Render blog, Feb 17, 2026Clear
- Time since the last raiseAbout 8.5 months since Feb 17, 2026. Render said in Feb that revenue growth was well above 100%, so no sign of a cash squeeze.CNBC, Feb 17, 2026Clear
- Structured or unusual termsNone reported in coverage. The only Form D under Render's SEC filer number is from Jan 2021 (the $6.75M seed), so later round terms cannot be checked there.SEC EDGAR filing list, checked Nov 3, 2026Open
- Who led the last roundAn extension led by Georgian, which already led the Series C, with existing backers only. No new outside lead set the $1.5B price.Render blog, Feb 17, 2026Flag
- Tender offers or secondary sales for staffNone reported. Searched Render's blog and press coverage; no tender date or price found.Render blog index, checked Nov 3, 2026Open
- Layoffs in the last 12 monthsNone found in news or Render posts. CNBC reported about 100 staff and plans to hire in Feb 2026; the careers page lists 35 open roles.Render careers page, checked Nov 3, 2026; CNBC, Feb 2026Clear
Clear: checked, nothing found. Flag: found, with the source. Open: could not be checked.
No filing reported
What the record says, and what we think it means.
The fact is the source's. The read, in italics, is ours.
- 01Good
Its closest rival stopped adding features.
Heroku blog, Feb 6, 2026; Render blog, Feb 9, 2026On Feb 6, 2026 Heroku said it is moving to a sustaining engineering model and will no longer offer Enterprise contracts to new customers. Render now offers up to $10K in credits and migration help.
Heroku users are exactly Render's buyers. CEO Anurag Goel told CNBC this is pushing customers to alternatives.
- 02Good
AI chatbots send it customers.
CNBC, Feb 17, 2026Goel told CNBC that chatbots have "almost singlehandedly, grown our business," as AI tools recommend Render when people ask where to deploy. Base44 and OpenAI are named users.
Free distribution, but it depends on how AI assistants choose to answer. That can change without warning.
- 03Watch
It rents its servers from AWS and Google.
CNBC, Feb 17, 2026CNBC reports Render runs on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud and is testing its own servers.
Own hardware could lift margins, but it adds capacity risk and capital cost. Watch for how this is funded.
- 04Neutral
Rode out the Oct 2025 AWS outage, partly by luck.
Render blog, Dec 2, 2025Builds and deploys in its Virginia region degraded for hours, but Render says no customer had complete downtime. It admits a similar failure in Oregon, where more customers run, would have hurt far more.
A candid write-up. Reliability is the product, so these incidents matter to its reputation.
- 05Watch
Pricing was reworked in August 2026.
Render blog, Apr 23, 2026Seat fees were dropped for flat plans (Pro $25, Scale $499 a month), but included bandwidth on Hobby and Pro was cut and overage moved to $0.15 per GB. Enterprise SSO and HIPAA moved to the Scale plan.
Good for growing teams, costlier for bandwidth-heavy small apps. Pricing moves like this show the push toward bigger accounts.
- 06Neutral
First user conference, with agent products.
Render blog, Jul 19, 2026At localhost in June 2026 Render launched Workflows (billed only while tasks run) and announced Sandboxes next. It said nearly 10 million services run on Render, handling over 200 billion requests a month.
The bet is moving from hosting web apps to running AI agents. These products are new and their revenue is unknown.
- 07Neutral
Distributed, with a San Francisco office.
Render careers page, checked Nov 3, 2026The careers page describes a distributed team; many roles are remote in the US or Canada, Bay Area staff use a SoMa office, and remote staff get a home office stipend. Equity comes with extended exercise windows.
Remote roles look limited to the US and Canada. Extended exercise windows make options easier to keep if you leave.
- 08Neutral
Little in public filings.
SEC Form D, Render Services Inc., filed Jan 14, 2021Render's only Form D, filed Jan 2021, reports $6.75M of equity sold to 15 investors and lists Anurag Goel as the sole named officer and director.
No Form D was found for the Series A, B or C, so board makeup and terms of later rounds are not public.
Engineering is paid 37% over market.
We save every company's roles, pay by team and level, AI share and churn every day, so each month this page can say more. Sparklines use their own scale.
Can AI agents do business with Render?
We checked the agent payment programs, developer docs and site rules an AI assistant would meet.
Built for agents. Hosted MCP server, 20+ skills, a CLI and an llms.txt; it now sells compute for agents too.
Still Remote read- YesAn MCP server agents can callHosted MCP server, generally available since Aug 21, 2025. Agents can create services and Postgres databases, read logs and metrics and change env vars. It cannot delete services or databases.Render blog, Aug 21, 2025
- YesTools for AI coding agentsSince Aug 2026: OAuth sign-in to the MCP server, more than 20 official skills for Claude Code, Cursor and Codex, and a CLI with JSON output. A Codex plugin shipped in Apr 2026.Render blog, Aug 11, 2026
- YesProducts for running AI agentsWorkflows (durable task runs) launched in 2026; managed sandboxes, an AI gateway and shared filesystem were announced as next. Sandboxes were not confirmed live as of Nov 3, 2026.Render blog, Jul 19, 2026; Feb 17, 2026
- YesSite and docs AI tools can readrender.com/llms.txt exists, about 55,000 characters, regenerated Nov 3, 2026. It routes agents to the MCP server, API and setup guides for Claude, Codex and Cursor.checked Nov 3, 2026
- YesLets AI crawlers read its siterobots.txt names GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and 13 other AI bots and allows them, blocking only /contact-sales, /newsletters/ and /lp/. Its comment mentions reserving training rights, but the signal line says ai-train=yes.checked Nov 3, 2026
Where Render puts AI to work.
- 1Runs its own data on its own productRender's data team moved its nightly pipeline to Render Workflows while it was in beta, and estimates related changes save about $100K a year. A next version would use an agent to diagnose failures; that is a plan, not live.Render blog, Aug 25, 2026
- 2Tests coding agents against its platformAn Aug 2025 post on Render's engineering blog scored Cursor, Claude Code, Gemini CLI and Codex on building and deploying apps through Render's MCP server. Render has not published how its own engineers use AI.Render blog, Aug 12, 2025
More listings than on Sep 7, most of them in engineering.
What has to be true for $1.5 billion to hold?
Render does not publish revenue, so the starting number is your assumption, not ours. A way to think, not a forecast, and not investment advice.
At 25x, Render needs $60 million of revenue to be worth $1.5 billion. Your world gets there with $118 million, so the next round likely prices above the last.
$100,000 of equity valued at the $1.50B Series C extension price would be worth about $196,000 on paper in this world, before dilution from new rounds, taxes and vesting. Private shares only turn into cash at a sale, an IPO or a tender offer.
A way to think, not a forecast, and not investment advice.
Render blog, Feb 17, 2026The signals, and which way they push.
- TailwindHeroku's customers are up for grabs.
Salesforce stopped new Heroku features and new Enterprise contracts in Feb 2026; Render answered within days with credits and migration help.
- TailwindSign-ups keep speeding up.
New developers a month went from 100,000 (Jan 2025) to 250,000 (Feb 2026) to about 400,000 (June 2026), helped by AI app builders like Base44.
- HeadwindA far richer rival.
Vercel raised $300M at $9.3B in Sept 2025, six times Render's valuation, and also courts AI app builders.
- HeadwindMargins depend on AWS and Google.
Render resells capacity it rents from the big clouds, and a large free tier adds cost. It is testing its own servers to change that.
Where Render ends up, if we had to bet.
Our calls, not facts. Each one is tied to something that already happened, so you can judge the reasoning.
- 1
Render lists on a US exchange by 2031.
Long shot 16%IPOIt has about 100 staff and has never published revenue. It raised $100M in 2026 at $1.5B, so it has cash to stay private for years.
CNBC, Feb 17, 2026 - 2
A large cloud or developer platform buys Render.
Coin flip 50%M&ABig clouds want the developers that AI app builders send to hosts like Render. But it is growing fast and recently raised, so it has no pressure to sell.
CNBC, Feb 17, 2026 - 3
Most new Render services are created by AI agents, not by people clicking a dashboard.
Likely 72%AIIts MCP server, skills and CLI exist so agents can deploy and operate apps. AI builders like Base44 already drive much of its sign-up growth.
Render blog, Aug 11, 2026 - 4
Workflows and Sandboxes become a large share of Render's revenue.
Coin flip 50%ProductsRender is repositioning as compute for agents, not just web hosting. The products launched in 2026 and no usage or revenue for them has been published.
Render blog, Jul 19, 2026 - 5
Render is the default home for teams leaving Heroku.
Likely 72%CompetitionHeroku stopped adding features in 2026 and Render targets its users with credits. Vercel and Railway compete, but Vercel focuses on front ends.
Heroku blog, Feb 6, 2026; CNBC, Feb 2026
Read by the Still Remote research agent on November 3, 2026 from the sources linked on this page. Facts and scenarios only, not investment advice.