Santa Cruz Works Announces Strategic Partnership with Runpod to Empower AI Startups with GPU-First Cloud Infrastructure

Santa Cruz Works is proud to announce a new partnership with Runpod, a leading GPU-first cloud provider that supports early-stage companies by delivering powerful GPU resources on demand. This collaboration will give startups in the Santa Cruz ecosystem seamless access to scalable, high-performance compute infrastructure—eliminating the complexities of building and managing AI infrastructure so founders can focus on innovating and bringing their AI models into production faster.

Runpod specializes in providing fully-loaded GPU-enabled environments that can be spun up instantly, running workloads with low latency across more than eight global regions. With dynamic real-time workload adaptation and a pay-as-you-go pricing model, Runpod makes it effortless for AI builders to train, fine-tune, and deploy models without upfront infrastructure investment or cold start delays.

John Tran, COO of Santa Cruz Works, highlighted the critical need for accessible infrastructure: “One of the biggest opportunities we see is building world-class AI companies by connecting tool builders, top researchers, and our local talent pool. Many leading AI companies already count UC Santa Cruz alumni among their co-founders and engineers. Our goal is to help that talent move faster by removing one of the most significant barriers they face: access to GPUs. With that hurdle gone, founders and entrepreneurs can focus entirely on building consequential AI companies.”

The platform is already trusted by major AI innovators such as Replit, Hugging Face, Perplexity, Cognition, Cursor, and OpenAI—making it a proven and reliable resource for cutting-edge AI development. Startups using Runpod can rapidly serve inference for image, text, and audio; fine-tune custom models on proprietary datasets; build intelligent agent-based workflows; or run compute-heavy tasks like rendering and simulations.

Zach Gulsby, Head of Partnerships at Runpod, emphasized the value of this partnership: “At Runpod, our mission is to remove the technical and financial barriers that often slow down early-stage AI companies. By partnering with Santa Cruz Works, we’re making it possible for founders to tap into world-class GPU infrastructure from day one, so they can focus on innovating instead of wrestling with infrastructure. Santa Cruz has a deep bench of AI talent and entrepreneurial energy, and we’re excited to help turn that potential into breakthrough products and companies.”

As foundational models like Claude continue to advance, John Tran explained the evolving relationship between models and AI agents: “Foundational models such as Claude are rapidly improving due to well-understood scaling laws—mathematical relationships predicting performance gains as parameters, data, and compute increase. This predictable growth sets the stage for increasingly capable AI agents that leverage these models to perform complex, autonomous tasks like long-horizon planning and multi-agent orchestration.

Customization is becoming more efficient thanks to parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques such as LoRA and adapters, which update only a small subset of parameters. This enables startups to tailor powerful models without the heavy costs of full fine-tuning. Runpod’s platform supports these advances by providing scalable, cost-effective compute, empowering startups to fine-tune models and deploy sophisticated agent workflows at scale.”

John Tran added on the broader vision for the partnership: “This partnership marks the first step in building out the Santa Cruz Works AI platform’s early-stage stack. Runpod’s GPU cloud infrastructure unlocks incredible agility and scale for startups here—eliminating infrastructure barriers and empowering builders to move fast with parity to larger startups and even comparable to enterprises.”

Over the coming months, Santa Cruz Works will continue expanding its AI ecosystem with new strategic partners, reinforcing Santa Cruz’s position as an emerging hub for AI innovation and entrepreneurship.

Zhen Lu, CEO of Runpod, concluded: “Runpod’s goal has always been to become the platform where builders can create and deploy AI systems that scale. Our partnership with Santa Cruz Works is a natural extension of that mission: putting world-class GPU infrastructure into the hands of founders and researchers from day one. By removing infrastructure barriers, we’re enabling the Santa Cruz startup community to move faster, experiment more, and turn ambitious ideas into AI systems that can make an impact at global scale.”

Startups interested in leveraging Runpod’s platform through Santa Cruz Works can learn more and get started by signing up via the link below—be sure to mention Santa Cruz Works to access exclusive benefits.

Learn more about Runpod: https://www.runpod.io/startup-program

Learn more about Santa Cruz Works: https://www.santacruzworks.org/news/run-pod-santa-cruz-works-accelerator

Signup for Runpod GPU-first Compute Credits as a Santa Cruz Works Member