Cloud startup Render Services Inc. today announced that it has raised $100 million from investors at a $1.5 billion valuation.

The capital was provided as an extension to a Series C round the company closed last January. Both deals were led by Georgian. Render’s latest raise also included contributions from Addition, Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst and 01 Advisors.

Deploying an artificial intelligence application in a public cloud environment can take several weeks. Developers have to implement cybersecurity controls, outage recovery workflows and various other mechanisms to ensure that the workload will operate reliably. San Francisco-based Render provides a cloud platform that promises to significantly shorten the process.

Developers can deploy an application to the company’s platform by connecting the GitHub repository that hosts its code and filling a relatively short form. From there, Render automatically carries out the more technical tasks involved in the process. The company also promises to ease several day-to-day workload management tasks.

Render’s platform includes an autoscaling feature that can increase or decrease a workload’s infrastructure usage as traffic levels change. Another built-in tool collects data about application health. If the tool shows that an update decreased an application’s performance, developers can undo the change using an automated rollback tool.

AI workloads running on Render can keep their records in managed PostgreSQL and Redis databases. PostgreSQL is a relational store suitable for holding an application’s main information repository. Redis is a significantly faster database that can cache frequently used items to speed up query times.

Customers can deploy their AI applications and the software components on which they rely to work in a private network. The network enables workloads to exchange traffic without sending it through the public web, which boosts security. A content delivery network can store certain files in data centers near users to speed up access.

Render faces competition from several serverless cloud services, which also automate much of manual work involved in maintaining application environments. The company says its platform provides a broader feature set than serverless alternatives. Notably, developers can deploy containers and use WebSockets, a technology that makes it possible to create long-running network connections between workloads.

“Traditional web apps rely on short-lived, stateless request-response cycles,” Chief Executive Officer Anurag Goel wrote in a blog post. “AI agents are the opposite: they are long-running, stateful, and distributed. They require unbounded execution times, complex memory management, persistent file systems, and durable workflows.”

Render’s customer base includes thousands of organizations including Twilio Inc., Shopify Inc. and Tripadvisor Inc. The company says tens of thousands of developers are signing up for its platform every month.

The company will use the proceeds from its latest raise to build new features. It’s working on a gateway that can analyze user requests to an application, send each one to the most suitable AI model and optimize inference costs. It also plans to release an object storage service, new observability features and several other enhancements.

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