Vultr Raises $333M at $3.5B Valuation

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cloud-ai-startup-vultr-raises-333-million-at-3-5-billion-valuation-7f35f1a9

by marc__1 • 2 years ago

105 87 2 years ago

wsj.com

leetrout• 2 years ago

"Cloud AI Startup Vultr"

We really have let this go too far when a mid tier VPS provider is now a "cloud AI startup".

nine_zeros• 2 years ago

The forgot to add "powered by block chain"

nickdothutton3• 2 years ago

Founded in 2014. Sigh.

notwhereyouare• 2 years ago

tweet reference by another poster makes it seem like they've been around since '96 in some form

mrweasel2• 2 years ago

They're not even a startup, the company is 10 years old.

The investment does make some sense from AMD perspective though. They need people to be able to access their GPUs, on a rental basis. They can't really throw enough money at AWS, GCP or Azure to make a difference, but Vultr is a trusted VPS provider, where AMD can buy a lot of influence for a realistic amount of money.

I do find it interesting that Vultr has such a low valuation, compared to other companies we've seen recently. It seems more reasonable, but they also have an actual business plan and have physical property. I don't know if they are profitable, because the media only focus on revenue, which is pointless if you don't put it into context.

kijin2• 2 years ago

Digital Ocean has a market cap of $3.49B as of yesterday, so $3.5B for Vultr sounds about right.

It's a mundane business in a crowded market, providing services they copied from other companies, which in turn anyone can copy. Oh, and they also need to compete with Akamai (Linode) who probably have much deeper pockets.

paxys• 2 years ago

10 years isn't all that long for a company to remain a "startup".

nikanj• 2 years ago

The company is not 10 years old, they loudly declare they've bootstrapped since 1996 https://x.com/Vultr/status/489139385154420736

MangoCoffee• 2 years ago

Masayoshi Son (SoftBank) is investing $100 billion (?) in the US and heavily focusing on AI. Maybe they're trying to grab his attention? /s.

karmakaze4• 2 years ago

This I don't mind. They offer cloud GPUs, why not call it what buyers want to see?

alberth• 2 years ago

In all fairness, Vultr was the first hosting company to offering fractional GPUs - and they gained a lot of traction with indie developers as a result of it.

Not sure if this was their first GPU offering, but they have been doing it for 2.5+ years (at minimum)

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220524005336/en/Int...

firesteelrain• 2 years ago

Azure has had fractional GPUs for a while. I am not sure when it started.

latchkey2• 2 years ago

Sadly, not available on MI300x quite yet, but AMD is working on it.

oefrha• 2 years ago

Wait until you find out that MinIO, the S3 compatible storage company, is apparently an AI company through and through now. https://min.io/

the AI revolution is powered by technologies that are either built on MinIO or integrated with it.

arresin• 2 years ago

Yeah I noticed that also. And it also left me wondering how an S3 you can host yourself is “””””””AI””””””.

kyleblarson• 2 years ago

Journalists learn a new phrase that sounds techy / flashy and beat it to death. Watch CNBC for 5 minutes and you will see their "experts" use the phrase "hyper scalers" at least 5 times.

chipgap98• 2 years ago

Its only an AI startup if it comes from the AI Startup region of California. Otherwise they are a sparkling independent business

neom2• 2 years ago

When DigitalOcean got it's a16z money: https://x.com/Vultr/status/489139385154420736

coolgoose• 2 years ago

That aged well :P

boringg• 2 years ago

Great socials strategy.

t3rabytes• 2 years ago

Right up there with New Relic writing a blog post about how you couldn't trust Sumo Logic (and should move to NR) after they got bought by Francisco Partners, only to be bought by Francisco Partners themselves.

infecto• 2 years ago

Assuming they did this raise because they need the capital to throw more into their GPU business, this is not really a remarkable quote. One of the first things noted in the article is this is soon to be the largest part of their business. This is their first capital injection too. While its fueled by the growth in AI, the business itself is mundane, they rent GPU access. Growing that requires a lot of capital.

moralestapia• 2 years ago

You held this grudge for 10 years, lmao.

Joke aside, 300M for 10% of your company in its only ever funding round is a pretty sweet deal. It made its founder a billionaire "overnight".

He stands at a company with about the same market cap as DO, but private, with full control and very low dilution. I would consider that a win.

neom2• 2 years ago

ngl I def feel a bit smug getting to pull that one out... but they used to tweet and delete mean shit at me all the time, heh. I feel like Joyent has more reason to hate me than Vultr, I never bothered Vultr!!!! :)

Yeah, jokes aside I think David Aninowsky is a super smart guy, I actually quite like him. Funnily enough, I'd even emailed them a couple years ago to pitch them letting me build this VERY idea for them, never heard back. :)

philsnow• 2 years ago

You held this grudge for 10 years, lmao.

~18 years ago I owned a Belkin router that would hijack on the order of 1/10000th of plain http requests and send them to a belkin.com domain to try to get people to buy more Belkin products.

I have not bought another Belkin product since.

Zambyte• 2 years ago

WSJ blocked my request to view the page after making me do a captia to see it, and then only the first paragraph is visible on the Wayback Machine. The modern web is a joy to use.

65• 2 years ago

WSJ is also blocking my request to view the page. Why they need a shitty request blocker for a web article - server side rendering only the first paragraph, I don't know.

SoloPolo• 2 years ago

Works for me using Bypass Paywalls Clean on Firefox (PC): https://github.com/bpc-clone/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean?t...

Lots of DMCA requests from news publishers means the binary extension is actually hosted on GitFlic.ru instead of Github or Firefox Addons site.

runako• 2 years ago

the binary extension is actually hosted on GitFlic.ru

Going out on a limb to say that nobody should install this.

airstrike• 2 years ago

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/cloud-ai-startup-vultr-raises-3...

mgkimsal2• 2 years ago

I've started testing with vultr some because they offer affordable fractional GPUs. I think I had something running for about $60/month with a 'real' GPU. 1/24th a GPU, IIRC, but... better than nothing. DO and linode offer GPU service, but the minimal cost just to get something up is significantly more.

alchemist1e9• 2 years ago

I’ve also use those … shhh don’t tell everyone, they have already been full on many occasions.

IMO Vultr is best cloud provider and I’ve tried many. I can’t give a single reason but more they seem to get the balance of features correct for me.

everfrustrated• 2 years ago

Fractional as in SR-IOV?

mgkimsal2• 2 years ago

I don't know what that is.

qoez• 2 years ago

Real nvidia competition will come from innovating in chips, not this thing which is mostly focused on way higher levels (cloud)

nijave• 2 years ago

Still good to have more competition in the GPU hosting space

karmakaze4• 2 years ago

My experience with Vultr has been better than with any of the other smaller VM providers. They always seem to provide just a little extra, and don't always nickle and dime you at every opportunity. I originally chose them because they most consistently had the best VM performance/price measured by a third party.

The other thing that stands out in that space is that their pricing isn't linear by vCPU and RAM. e.g. larger instances give better ratios and also offer bare-metal servers if you got to a scale and stability where that would be better suited.

b-lee• 2 years ago

I am considering them, but reviews on Trustpilot are less than favorable. I'm not sure whether or not to trust the site.

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/vultr.com

zie• 2 years ago

I've been happy enough over the last 5+ years, but I'm not a huge user and I've only ever interacted with their support once many years ago, and it was fine.

No complaints.

karmakaze4• 2 years ago

Read the ratings/comments on the first page and it looks like one-off case complaints, though I have nothing to back that up than my experience. I've been using them 6+ years and their systems have just worked as advertised and never needed to contact their support. I've had overdue bills which I've paid maybe a month later and it was never a problem--never got any threats to suspend service or anything.

Perhaps they act quickly on DMCA reports, so if you're in a gray area don't use them?

I was just curious what kind of promotions they have and saw this one for $300 in credits and $100 free trial[0].

[0] https://sites.google.com/site/vultrfreecredit

PaywallBuster• 2 years ago

i've run 5$ vps for years with them

mostly works, there's maybe a "restart" once a year due to hardware problems

all handled transparently without you intervention

support is responsive enough

for personal use works perfect

---

from a business account with many servers expecting higher reliability sometimes they don't correspond and have too many maintenance windows with _guaranteed_ downtiem

TheFreim• 2 years ago

I've been using Vultr for many years without issue. Currently I have a $5 VPS that has been running for nearly two years straight without any downtime.

njt• 2 years ago

I've been running VPSs with them for the last 9 years. Never had a problem. And unlike Digital Ocean, they allow you to mount your own ISOs and fully support the BSDs.

Unless someone buys them out in the future and platform decay[1] happens, you can trust them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

hgs3• 2 years ago

I've been using Vultr for the past 6-ish months and I've been happy with them. They have great prices for what you get. Sadly, I feel that review sites often skew negative because I think people are more motivated to find time to share a negative experience than a positive one.

sorenbs• 2 years ago

I am somehow uniquely well positioned to answer this question. I worked at Trustpilot for 7 years, and am now a relatively large Vultr customer.

Vultr is great!

impulser_• 2 years ago

Are they bigger than DigitalOcean?

DigitalOcean is also currently valued at 3.5 billion right now, does ~800m ARR, 125m FCF, and profitable.

Anyone know how Vultr compares to this?

blackcoffeeice• 2 years ago

Vultr valuation makes no sense. Looks like their ARR was $150MM in October 2023

zcdziura• 2 years ago

I originally signed up with Vultr because they make it easy to set up an OpenBSD server, and I wanted to experiment with hosting my own mail server on OpenBSD. I've since expanded my usage with them and host everything on Vultr. Very satisfied with their service!

kyledrake• 2 years ago

I use Vultr for a BGP anycast CDN (they let you bring your own ips) and they're overall excellent. They also have budget GPU VPSes that are perfect for webgl screenshotting via chrome headless. Their sales rep gave me a 10% discount and we're not even slightly in their high volume category. Extremely underrated VPS provider IMO, I've had better results with them than DO. I hope this development does not change things.

icedchai3• 2 years ago

I searched for a provider that would let me do BGP on a VPS and found Vultr. Their network is solid with tons of peers, low latency, high bandwidth to my location. My brief interaction with their support was very smooth.

rmoriz• 2 years ago

Can you access other Vultr customers hosted nearby when originating from your announced network? They seem to have an issue at least in FRA.

gorbypark• 2 years ago

I don't remember the exact details, but I used to have a Vultr VPS (I think the smallest they had, for something like $2.50/month) for a few years running OpenBSD. One day I noticed IPV6 had stopped working, so I emailed support after a while because I wasn't sure if I had broken it during an upgrade a few months before or not (I don't ever really specifically use IPV6). Anyways, got a super detailed reply back from support with the exact cause / how to fix it that was specific to OpenBSD. I was pretty surprised they had someone replying to emails from a $2.50/month customer who was actually knowledgeable about a fairly niche OS!

dzonga• 2 years ago

and i'm still salty that 2.5 vps is can't be found anymore.

belval• 2 years ago

Do you mean on vultr or in general? Because $2.5/month VPS are still widely available on lowendbox: https://lowendbox.com/.

pocketarc• 2 years ago

When people try to cheap out on customer support, this is exactly what they lose, and it's something I always try to bear in mind as I go about things.

By having someone like that replying to emails, they ended up with someone praising them years down the line in a high-profile place, where it'll be seen by countless engineers.

icedchai3• 2 years ago

I use Vultr for a couple of VPSes. They are great!

rurp• 2 years ago

That's awesome and reminds me of a similar experience I had with Schwab some years ago. I contacted support with a question from an account with a paltry amount of money in it and got back a very detailed and helpful response. My account value to them was probably similar to your $2.50/month VPS account so I was blown away at the quality of the response. I have stuck with the company for years and recommended them multiple times.

VoidWhisperer• 2 years ago

Interesting that this ends up posted on the same day I got this email from them for my VM hosting a vpn:

"Our monitoring system indicated an issue with the hardware node hosting the instances listed in this email. A sudden reboot has been detected. Our engineering team is currently investigating the issue that caused this, but we expect no impact on data and/or configurations."

Gud• 2 years ago

I was a happy Vultr customer until the day I tried to get port 25 unblocked. Instead of getting it unblocked I received a ”sorry not sorry” copy paste from some senior sales guy.

I had spent thousands of dollars on their services running my servers for years.

Needless to say I immediately dumped them, moved to Hetzner and 1 week later I had my own mail server running(still do).

indigodaddy2• 2 years ago

I tested them out maybe like 7-9 years ago and that's the reason I didn't continue. 25 blocked by default. Just left a bad taste in my mouth. I mean sure they are trying to discourage spammers but just outright blocked by default seemed a bit overboard to me

rstupek• 2 years ago

That’s pretty well standard for VPS providers at this point isn’t it?

ToDougie• 2 years ago

Lesson here is always be transparent about your product. If you're permanently blocking ports by default, put some emphasis on that limitation during the sales process.

Maybe they did a risk analysis. Maybe they don't have the bandwidth to create a vetting process. Either way, be transparent.

oarsinsync• 2 years ago

I mean sure they are trying to discourage spammers but just outright blocked by default seemed a bit overboard to me

How would you go about discouraging spammers, if not using a block that is removed if you ask?

(They removed my block in the first 2 months of my service, all I did was ask)

extraduder_ire• 2 years ago

That's odd. I had a single HDD vps for a few months, back when they offered those, and they immediately unblocked port 25 when I asked them via a support ticket. At the time I had expected more pushback about it, or clarifying questions. I kept using that same server for many years until they stopped offering that tier of server and force stopped it many years later.

The replacement vps I'm currently using still has the port blocked because I haven't felt the need to send email like that in quite a while.

ksec• 2 years ago

When they announced Bare Metal I was hoping it was closer to Hetzner, basically old fashion dedicated server.

AMD EPYC™ 9454P 48 Core / 96 Threads, + 128 GB DDR5 ECC + 3.84 TB NVMe SSD for $221 and a $88 one time set up fee on Hetzner. Even if they could do it at $100 more expensive at $321 would still have been good enough.

But their Cloud / VPS offering are still very good. Now that Linode is nearly gone. DO is mostly Intel based. Vultr is mostly AMD. The other one that is close if not better is UpCloud.

cyanydeez• 2 years ago

Vultr was still sending me invoices despite explicitly canceling service. Horrible service and billing system.

latchkey2• 2 years ago

This is awesome news. The more players in this market, the more validation we (Hot Aisle) have for the things we've been working on for over a year now.

Having spent a bunch of time talking in person with the Vultr team, they are a great group of people.

Vultr Raises $333M at $3.5B Valuation

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