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.
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.
> Oh, and they also need to compete with Akamai (Linode) who probably have much deeper pockets.
As of a couple (2-3 years ago) Akamai had no plans or interest to expand into Cloud. They wanted to remain on-prem/hybrid because of existing synergies and strategies. Their CDN business was also heavily used by companies that have cloud BUs.
Yet Akamai hedged their bet by acquiring a well-known VPS company.
Just because they aren't aggressive about expanding Linode doesn't mean that Linode is not a serious competitor to Vultr. Linode offers nearly everything Vultr does, at a similar price point.
That makes more sense to me, because I remember have looked at their offerings earlier as they where one of the only places you could run OpenBSD. So I was a little surprised to see 2014 on their websites, but figured I just remembered wrong.
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.