(BB.003)
We did not brand it. We built it.
Ed Goode had a read on the GPU shortage and nothing built. We came in before incorporation and we stayed: the first working product, the site that went into Y Combinator’s Summer 2023 batch, and years inside the platform itself. Shadeform now spans 30+ clouds. We are still shipping it with him.
Client
Shadeform
The GPU Cloud Marketplace. One API and one console across 30+ clouds and 100+ regions, used by teams at Fal, Parasail, Stanford and Berkeley.
Scope
- Product Strategy
- Full-Stack Build
- Platform Engineering
- UI / UX
- Brand & Art Direction
Stack
- Next.js
- React
- Tailwind
- Vercel
- Figma
Timeline
4+ years
2022 - Present
A thesis, two people, and nothing built yet.
Ed had spent years inside cloud infrastructure at Microsoft and could see what was coming: training and inference demand was about to outrun every GPU on the market, and the supply that did exist sat scattered across providers nobody had heard of, each behind its own API. He had the read. What he did not have was a company, and more to the point, he did not have a product. An investor gives an application a few minutes, and a deck is not a demo. The job was not to make an idea look credible. It was to make it run.
Challenge
What we shipped
(01)
The first product, not the first logo
Shadeform v1 was a working tool: point it at your infrastructure on one cloud and it rewrote that stack for another. We designed it and we built it, end to end. The walkthrough ran Step 1 through Step 4 and finished with the same deployment rendered for Azure and for AWS side by side, because the only convincing argument for a translation layer is watching it translate. Navy on grey, dashed rules, no decoration. This is what Y Combinator was looking at, and it ran.
(02)
Inside the platform
The hard part was never the mark. Thirty-odd GPU providers expose thirty-odd different APIs, each with its own idea of what a region is, what an instance type is called, and what counts as available. We worked the surfaces that hide all of it: the console, the deploy paths, the pricing and availability views that have to resolve a fragmented supply chain into one line a developer can read without thinking. Front end in Next.js, shipped on Vercel, tuned against a backend that is answering thirty vendors at once. This is the part most studios hand off, and it is the part that decides whether any of the rest was true.
(03)
The brand kept pace because the product moved
Infrastructure translation became GPU availability, which became a marketplace. Each turn was a product decision first, and the identity followed it rather than led it. We ran the rebrands with Ed and drew a full variant set across light and dark, so the next pivot would not need a new logo to go with it.
The results
Y Combinator
Summer 2023 batch
Clouds on the marketplace
Across 100+ regions
Revenue in 2024
On a five-person team
Partnership & counting
Since 2022
The takeaway
Any agency can draw you a logo. We wrote the product underneath it, before there was a company to put it in.
This is what a full house actually means: strategy, engineering, product and brand under one roof, in that order. Ed came to us with a read on a market and left with something that runs. Bring us the idea. We will build the machine.
Recognition
Y Combinator, Summer 2023.
Shadeform went into YC’s S23 batch on a product that worked, built before the company legally existed. Ed and Ronald took it from there, and we kept building alongside them.
Us.
Our team consists of only the best and brightest. From years of working in the industry, our founder Robert has hand-selected only the best talent to form the absolute Dream Team in tech. Combined we have the skills necessary for any challenge big or small. We tackle anything from boutique landing pages, to highly technical platform solutions, integrating modern practices and AI to all sorts of industry - from Insurance, Government, to Ecommerce. We hold clearances, certs, and anything necessary to hit the ground running. Chat with us today to start your journey.
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