William Layden Co-Founded Rune Raises $40M in Series A Funding

The round also saw participation from Union Square Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Activate Capital, Committed Capital, Timeless Partners, and Logos Fund.

The company plans to use the funding to expand its pipeline of power partnerships and compute customers.

What is Rune?

Rune develops modular compute systems that use renewable energy to power AI workloads.

Its main product, RELIC, captures unused electricity from solar plants and uses it for AI compute without connecting to the traditional power grid.

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The company says solar plants can waste up to 20% of the energy they generate because the electricity cannot always be sold or delivered to the grid. RELIC is designed to use this stranded power at the source, avoiding grid infrastructure and related costs.

Rune's system can support AI inference workloads, with compute customers able to reserve inference capacity.

How Much Funding Has Rune Raised?

Rune has raised $40 million in its latest Series A funding round.

The funding brings the company's total amount raised to $53.5 million.

The source did not provide details of previous funding rounds.

Who Invested in Rune’s Series A Round?

Spark Capital led the Series A funding round.

Other participating investors include:

• Union Square Ventures
• Lowercarbon Capital
• Activate Capital
• Committed Capital
• Timeless Partners
• Logos Fund

Why the Funding Matters

Rune will use the new funding to expand its pipeline of power partnerships and compute customers.

The company is deploying RELIC at renewable energy sites to provide AI compute without traditional grid connections or new construction.

Who founded Rune?

Rune was founded by William Layden.

The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Market and Business Growth

Rune has deployed RELIC across initial clean energy partner sites.

Its latest deployment is at a 200MW solar facility in Texas. The installation is operating on an existing renewable energy asset without site modifications, grid work or construction.

Rune says RELIC can be deployed in as little as six weeks and reduces non-compute infrastructure costs by 85% compared with traditional AI data centers.

What Happens Next?

Rune plans to expand its pipeline of power partnerships and compute customers.

The company will continue deploying RELIC at renewable energy sites and expanding access to AI inference capacity powered by stranded solar energy.

“Every solar plant is a latent data center. The power is already there, sitting idle while AI labs wait years for grid connections that may never come,” said William Layden, Co-Founder and CEO of Rune. “We built RELIC to close that gap with compute that’s online in days, powered by energy the grid was throwing away.”

“Demand for AI infrastructure is growing faster than it can be delivered. Rune deploys compute directly behind the meter at operating solar farms, converting clean power into rapidly scalable AI capacity,” said Santo Politi, Founder, and General Partner of Spark Capital.

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