Zhen Lu

Zhen Lu is co-founder and CEO of RunPod, a GPU cloud for AI builders. He sells pods and serverless endpoints aimed at developers who need capacity quickly rather than a year-long cloud procurement cycle.

Builder cloud, not enterprise theater

RunPod's public story is developer-first GPU rental and serverless inference with transparent pricing. Lu appears in industry interviews - including a Fortt Knox / CNBC conversation - explaining how smaller teams buy compute.

Seed-stage growth

The company has raised seed capital while expanding regions and GPU SKUs. Marketing stays close to community developers, startups, and research users who bounce between training and inference jobs.

On access to GPUs

Lu frames RunPod as access infrastructure: make high-end accelerators usable without becoming a hyperscaler customer. That access narrative is why the company shows up in AIR's GPU cloud reviews alongside larger names.