Shadeform is on a mission to simplify access to global GPU infrastructure by offering a GPU cloud marketplace that unifies provisioning across more than 20 cloud providers via a single API.

“We’ve been building this company for the past two years,” Founder Ed Goode explains, “and ultimately we’re working towards a fully managed cloud-like experience, but built on top of a distributed compute layer.”

With growing demand from AI workloads and clients needing access to scarce GPU resources, Shadeform has become a trusted infrastructure orchestrator for both startups and enterprises.

Goode’s prior experience at Microsoft exposed a critical inefficiency: while VM provisioning across cloud platforms varies wildly, the core service—compute—is virtually the same. This insight led to the creation of a multi-cloud tool, and eventually to Shadeform’s focus on GPUs as AI adoption surged.

Unifying fragmented GPU infrastructure

Shadeform provides an elegant solution to one of the biggest problems in AI infrastructure today: scattered, region-locked GPU supply. “Oftentimes our clients can’t get all the inventory they want in a single cloud,” Goode says. “So we help them deploy a multi-cloud strategy—nodes in Europe, America, Asia, and elsewhere.”

The platform abstracts complexity, offering a consistent provisioning and management experience even across bare metal and hyperscale providers.

Though Shadeform also supports some CPU instances, customer demand is overwhelmingly focused on GPU-enabled virtual machines—especially for inference workloads. “Customers come to us looking for GPU-enabled VMs,” Goode confirms. “That’s where the demand is.”

A natural partnership

Shadeform’s relationship with DigitalOcean started organically through shared connections with the Paperspace team (acquired by DigitalOcean in 2023). “We were initially reselling Paperspace servers,” Goode says, “but more recently, since capacity has opened up directly at DigitalOcean, the partnership has shifted.”

Today, Shadeform’s business with DigitalOcean has two components: on-demand Gradient GPU provisioning through its unified platform, and a referral-based model where customers deploy on reserved DigitalOcean Gradient GPU nodes. “We’re not actually the end consumer of the compute—we’re the partner channel for DO and other neo-clouds,” Goode explains.

Goode and his team were already fans of DigitalOcean long before the formal collaboration began. “A number of our engineers’ favorite cloud platform is DO,” he says. “We’ve been very excited to see them step up their presence in the GPU space, and we’re fortunate to partner with them to help scale some of that capacity and demand.”

Growing together

Shadeform is now focused on growth, moving up-market into larger enterprise accounts while expanding its ecosystem. “We’ve become the go-to provider for a number of customer niches within the industry,” Goode says. “And we’re working on expanding that.”

DigitalOcean remains central to that vision. “We’ve really enjoyed working with everyone at DigitalOcean,” Goode says. “They’ve helped us deal with outages, they’ve been on top of it, and we’re looking forward to the next couple of years working together.”

Ultimately, Shadeform’s goal is to change the cloud infrastructure landscape. “We want to manage every GPU-enabled server on the globe,” Goode emphasizes, “and create a marketplace that lets the best clouds rise to the top.”

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