From a quiet office in West Palm Beach, Vultr is offering startups and enterprises alike a faster, cheaper, and more flexible way to build in the cloud
When Kevin Cochrane moved to South Florida nearly a decade ago, he wasn’t looking to join another startup. He was looking to help build a tech scene.
A veteran of the enterprise software world with decades of experience and an IPO under his belt, Cochrane had spent his career in Silicon Valley and Europe. But something about South Florida stuck. And when he stumbled onto Vultr, then a little-known cloud infrastructure provider just up the road in West Palm, he saw something few others had.
“I realized immediately they were solving the exact problem I’d been grappling with,” says Cochrane, now the company’s chief marketing officer. “The public cloud was too expensive, too complex, and too closed.”
Vultr is now the largest privately held public cloud provider in the world. While most developers default to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, Vultr offers the same capabilities at a fraction of the cost. A team of engineers with deep roots in high-scale hosting launched the platform in 2014. Their goal: create a powerful alternative to the big four cloud giants, one that developers could use instantly, and that companies of all sizes could afford. A decade later, Vultr supports everyone from hobbyists and AI startups to global enterprises.
Headquartered in West Palm Beach, Vultr has grown to more than 250 employees globally, with a third of those based in South Florida. The team raised $333 million in growth capital last year, an investment led by AMD Ventures and LuminArx Capital Management, vaulting the company value to $3.5 billion. It was their first-ever outside funding round, and the largest raise in South Florida for 2024. Vultr will use the funds to double down on go-to-market expansion, customer support, and platform growth.
Their ambitions go further. Vultr wants to become the next Amazon or Google, not only in size, but in shaping what comes next. “We’re aiming to be the leader in AI infrastructure,” says Cochrane. That includes bringing top-tier Nvidia and AMD GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) to market, globally, with lower costs and fewer barriers. Vultr leases access to GPUs, the chips that power AI models, to its customers.
Indeed, one of the reasons that AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) invested in Vultr was so that it could acquire more GPUs, specifically those manufactured by AMD. The investment is a way for “customers to experience AMD GPUs through their platform,” Mathew Hein, AMD’s chief strategy officer of corporate development, told the Wall Street Journal. And while AMD won’t force Vultr to use only its chips, “We look at them as somebody that’s going to be bringing up AMD capacity this generation and future generations.”
Cochrane believes that building this next-generation infrastructure company from South Florida is not just possible, but powerful. “There’s incredible talent here,” he says. “What we’re missing is the flywheel of second- and third-time founders reinvesting back into the community. But it’s coming. You can feel it.”
Vultr is helping fuel that momentum, betting that the future of cloud and AI will be built on more open, developer-friendly platforms. The company actively supports local tech meetups, partners with universities, and proudly represents Miami and West Palm in its global outreach.
As for what’s next, Cochrane is clear: “We want to be the cloud provider that empowers everyone, whether you’re a solo dev with an idea or a Fortune 100 undergoing a full-scale AI transformation. And we want to do it from right here in South Florida.”
