Gamers Share Their GPUs, Salad Takes 23%: the $15M Raise at a $70M Valuation

The best detail in this November 2021 tape arrives in the first minute: salad.com, the URL, was bought that year from Hidden Valley Ranch, which had owned it since 1996. Bob Miles wouldn’t name the price — only that it was “about half” what domain-appraisal tools suggested. It was the cheapest thing about a company making one of the strangest offers in software: leave your gaming PC on, let strangers’ workloads run on your GPU, and get paid in games, gift cards, and subscriptions.

Miles knew exactly how strange the pitch sounded, and reached for the comparison every two-sided marketplace eventually earns:

It’s analogous to Airbnb or Uber 10, 15 years ago — complete strangers going to pick you up in their car. We’re bringing the same uncomfortable value proposition to market.

Bob Miles, founder & CEO, Salad

Three ways a gamer’s idle GPU becomes revenue

Nathan spent most of the interview doing what he does with marketplace founders: separating volume from revenue. A machine like Miles’s own generated $60–65 a month in Salad balance against $5–15 of extra electricity. From there, Salad earned its cut three ways:

• Marketplace margin — a $40 Amazon gift card costs 50 in Salad balance; across all rewards the markup averaged 23%.
• Breakage — balances that never get spent. At taping, 18% of outstanding balance belonged to users inactive for six months or more — unrealized, because Salad wasn’t muting anyone’s balance.
• The compute itself — Salad’s cost per teraflop-hour ran about one-fifth of an AWS spot instance, and the network mined “half a dozen to a dozen” web3 protocols that paid for the horsepower.

The $12M round Nathan couldn’t stop laughing about

The funding history is a study in story-first fundraising, and the tape doesn’t hide the comedy. Salad raised $2 million in SAFEs, then a $3.2 million seed in 2020 at $12 million pre-money — a year the company recognized about $150,000 in revenue. “You laugh when you say that,” Nathan pushed. Miles’s answer: “I think they got a great deal.” At taping he was out raising a $15 million Series A on a $5 million run rate, wanting $60–70 million pre-money with “verbal terms not where I want them to be” — the dataset records the round at a $70 million valuation.

• 2018 Launch. An early co-founder from management consulting leaves 16–18 months in; Miles carries it alone from there.
• 2020 $3.2M seed at $12M pre-money, on roughly $150K of revenue.
• 2021 The breakout: ~$3M of marketplace spend, the salad.com domain bought from Hidden Valley Ranch, and a $15M Series A raise recorded at a $70M valuation.

There was also a distinctly 2021 subplot: Salad was being sued over website accessibility mid-raise. Miles called it frivolous but rebuilt the site to spec anyway — and delivered the line of the episode: “Usually when you’re getting sued is when you’ve made it. I wouldn’t say we’re quite there yet — we’re waiting for that $273 million valuation.”

What the dataset shows after the tape

The rounds Miles was chasing closed into a business that kept compounding after the crypto demand of 2021 gave way: $4.6 million in 2022, an estimated $6.2 million in 2023, and an estimated $10.4 million by October 2024, with the team growing from 25 people at taping to 52. The “exciting diversified workloads from Fortune 500s” he teased on tape describe exactly the compute market that exploded in the years after. Current numbers are on Salad’s GetLatka profile.

Miles, mid-thirties with a six-week-old at home and a self-declared reading history that ended with Goosebumps, closed on the most honest founder answer in the catalog: “No one really has a clue what they’re doing. I grew up thinking that adults had it all figured out — that is so far from the truth. We should all respect that a little earlier in life, I reckon.”

SourcesNathan’s November 2021 interview with Bob Miles; GetLatka dataset rows through October 2024 (2023 and 2024 revenue are estimates).