How 2 Developers Turned a $50,000 Basement Side Hustle Into a $120 Million AI Business
Runpod took off after a VC discovered it on Reddit.
Zhen Lu and Pardeep Singh spent $50,000 on GPUs in their New Jersey basements to mine Ethereum, they told TechCrunch. When that was unprofitable, they needed to justify the investment to their wives. So, they converted the mining rigs into AI servers and built software to make GPU development less painful.
They posted on Reddit offering free server access for feedback. Their big break came when Dell Technologies Capital partner Radhika Malik spotted their posts and reached out. Within nine months of launching in early 2022, they’d quit their Comcast jobs and hit $1 million in revenue.
By May 2024, Runpod had 100,000 developers and closed a $20 million seed round co-led by Dell and Intel. Today, the AI app hosting platform serves 500,000 developers, including OpenAI, Perplexity and Zillow, and generates $120 million in annual revenue. Their timing was perfect. They launched AI hosting two years before ChatGPT made it essential.
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Zhen Lu and Pardeep Singh spent $50,000 on GPUs in their New Jersey basements to mine Ethereum, they told TechCrunch. When that was unprofitable, they needed to justify the investment to their wives. So, they converted the mining rigs into AI servers and built software to make GPU development less painful.
They posted on Reddit offering free server access for feedback. Their big break came when Dell Technologies Capital partner Radhika Malik spotted their posts and reached out. Within nine months of launching in early 2022, they’d quit their Comcast jobs and hit $1 million in revenue.
By May 2024, Runpod had 100,000 developers and closed a $20 million seed round co-led by Dell and Intel. Today, the AI app hosting platform serves 500,000 developers, including OpenAI, Perplexity and Zillow, and generates $120 million in annual revenue. Their timing was perfect. They launched AI hosting two years before ChatGPT made it essential.
Sign up for the Money Makers newsletter to get weekly, expert-backed tips to help you earn more money — from real people who founded and scaled successful businesses. Get it in your inbox.
