How Startups Can Utilize Serverless with Vast.ai to Grow

Startups rarely get the luxury of unlimited time or budget. Most are trying to build quickly and stretch every dollar as far as possible. For teams working with AI, that pressure can intensify as compute costs and infrastructure decisions quickly eat into runway.

Traditional cloud models don’t make this any easier. Proper resource management is complicated, and teams often end up choosing between costly over-provisioned resources or hardware that can’t keep up. On the other hand, buying your own GPUs is a heavy upfront investment that locks you in at a stage when flexibility matters most – because needs can change on a dime.

Vast Serverless offers a different path.

How Vast Serverless Fits Startup Reality

Vast Serverless replaces capacity planning with autoscaling responsiveness. That means manual instance management is entirely out of the picture. Startups can run inference and batch workloads on a GPU fleet that scales automatically – and instead of worrying about provisioning, simply define a few performance targets and Vast does the rest.

On Vast Serverless, this scalability is paired with the flexibility of our globally distributed GPU cloud, where more than 18,000 GPUs from 1,300+ providers are continuously benchmarked, ranked, and matched to your workload. In short, you run what you need, when you need it, and only pay for what you use.

For startups, that’s a game-changer in a few important ways:

1. Scaling Without Infrastructure Overhead

From rapid prototyping to onboarding spikes, startups often experience fluctuating demand. With Vast Serverless, your compute capacity expands automatically to meet your needs, with no laggy cold starts or manual scaling.

If you have to pivot from a handful of GPUs to dozens of H100s for a brief period, the system handles that on its own – selecting the fastest and most cost-efficient options available in the moment – without you having to deal with the infrastructure overhead.

2. Cost-Effective Compute Power

With our predictive optimization feature, Vast Serverless analyzes usage patterns, real-time load, and ongoing market benchmarking in order to anticipate demand before it peaks. Workloads are then intelligently routed in real time to the machines that deliver the best performance per dollar. There are no hidden premiums or special pricing tiers.

This means you’re not locked into a specific rate or GPU type, and you don’t have to check spot prices – and you also don’t pay for idle hardware sitting on standby just in case. Instead, every optimization extends how far your budget goes.

3. A Global GPU Fleet Gives You Options

As a startup, you often need to test and iterate fast. Sometimes that means experimenting on consumer GPUs for quick cycles, and other times you might need enterprise-grade GPUs like A100s, H100s, or even B200s for production inference.

With Vast Serverless, you have a wide range of GPU options. You can tap into our global fleet spanning 68 GPU types and 50+ filters – to select for memory, bandwidth, max instance duration, and more – and leverage exactly what you need at every stage of development and growth. Plus, with over 500 provider locations across all regions, you can deploy closer to your users when latency matters and never have to change your setup.

From Prototype to Production – Faster

Whether you’re working with large language models (LLMs), diffusion models, video processing, embeddings, or other GPU-intensive tasks, our pre-built autoscaler templates can help get you up and running quickly. Launch popular frameworks like TGI, vLLM, or ComfyUI in minutes, and enjoy access to ample metrics, debugging tools, and Jupyter and SSH, so you can troubleshoot quickly.

With Vast Serverless, you can streamline workflows without giving up any control – helping you build and grow faster as demands evolve over time.

Ready for Enterprise Requirements When You Are

As companies and products mature, security expectations rise rapidly. Vast.ai is fully SOC 2 certified, and our Secure Cloud mode routes workloads exclusively through vetted datacenters that meet ISO 27001 and Tier 2/3 standards at minimum. You can also enable private VPN access and optional audit trails if desired.

Vast Serverless offers a practical way to meet increasing security and compliance needs while still maintaining the agility that startups rely on. Regardless of the path you choose with Vast.ai, data sovereignty stays in your control no matter what.

Vast Serverless: Helping Startups Grow on Their Own Terms

For startups balancing tight timelines with even tighter budgets, flexibility matters. Vast Serverless is the lowest-cost autoscaling GPU cloud on the market today, yet it offers world-class security, a broad GPU selection, and the radical price transparency and developer control that early-stage teams depend on.

With Vast Serverless, you can experiment, launch, and scale without infrastructure slowing you down – and you’ll get far more out of every dollar spent.

Ready to see where Serverless can take you? Check out our Serverless Product Overview, and get started today!