Railway, a San Francisco-based cloud platform that has quietly amassed two million builders with out spending a greenback on advertising and marketing, introduced Thursday that it raised $100 million in a Sequence B funding spherical, as surging demand for synthetic intelligence functions exposes the restrictions of legacy cloud infrastructure.
TQ Ventures led the spherical, with participation from FPV Ventures, Redpoint, and Unusual Ventures. The funding values Railway as probably the most important infrastructure startups to emerge throughout the AI increase, capitalizing on developer frustration with the complexity and price of conventional platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.
“As AI fashions get higher at writing code, increasingly more individuals are asking the age-old query: the place, and the way, do I run my functions?” mentioned Jake Cooper, Railway’s 28-year-old founder and chief government, in an unique interview with VentureBeat. “The final era of cloud primitives had been sluggish and outdated, and now with AI transferring all the things quicker, groups merely cannot sustain.”
The funding is a dramatic acceleration for a corporation that has charted an unconventional path by means of the cloud computing {industry}. Railway raised simply $24 million in complete earlier than this spherical, together with a $20 million Series A from Redpoint in 2022. The corporate now processes greater than 10 million deployments month-to-month and handles over one trillion requests by means of its edge community — metrics that rival far bigger and better-funded rivals.
Why three-minute deploy instances have turn into unacceptable within the age of AI coding assistants
Railway’s pitch rests on a easy commentary: the instruments builders use to deploy and handle software program had been designed for a slower period. A normal build-and-deploy cycle utilizing Terraform, the industry-standard infrastructure instrument, takes two to 3 minutes. That delay, as soon as tolerable, has turn into a vital bottleneck as AI coding assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor can generate working code in seconds.
“When godly intelligence is on faucet and may resolve any drawback in three seconds, these amalgamations of methods turn into bottlenecks,” Cooper instructed VentureBeat. “What was actually cool for people to deploy in 10 seconds or much less is now desk stakes for brokers.”
The corporate claims its platform delivers deployments in beneath one second — quick sufficient to maintain tempo with AI-generated code. Clients report a tenfold enhance in developer velocity and as much as 65 % value financial savings in comparison with conventional cloud suppliers.
These numbers come immediately from enterprise shoppers, not inner benchmarks. Daniel Lobaton, chief expertise officer at G2X, a platform serving 100,000 federal contractors, measured deployment pace enhancements of seven instances quicker and an 87 % value discount after migrating to Railway. His infrastructure invoice dropped from $15,000 per 30 days to roughly $1,000.
“The work that used to take me per week on our earlier infrastructure, I can do in Railway in like a day,” Lobaton mentioned. “If I need to spin up a brand new service and check completely different architectures, it might take so lengthy on our previous setup. In Railway I can launch six providers in two minutes.”
Contained in the controversial resolution to desert Google Cloud and construct information facilities from scratch
What distinguishes Railway from rivals like Render and Fly.io is the depth of its vertical integration. In 2024, the corporate made the bizarre resolution to desert Google Cloud fully and construct its personal information facilities, a transfer that echoes the well-known Alan Kay maxim: “People who find themselves actually critical about software program ought to make their very own {hardware}.”
“We needed to design {hardware} in a approach the place we might construct a differentiated expertise,” Cooper mentioned. “Having full management over the community, compute, and storage layers lets us do actually quick construct and deploy loops, the sort that enables us to maneuver at ‘agentic pace’ whereas staying 100% the smoothest experience on the town.”
The method paid dividends throughout current widespread outages that affected main cloud suppliers — Railway remained on-line all through.
This soup-to-nuts management permits pricing that undercuts the hyperscalers by roughly 50 % and newer cloud startups by three to 4 instances. Railway costs by the second for precise compute utilization: $0.00000386 per gigabyte-second of reminiscence, $0.00000772 per vCPU-second, and $0.00000006 per gigabyte-second of storage. There aren’t any costs for idle digital machines — a stark distinction to the standard cloud mannequin the place clients pay for provisioned capability whether or not they use it or not.
“The traditional knowledge is that the massive guys have economies of scale to supply higher pricing,” Cooper famous. “However once they’re charging for VMs that normally sit idle within the cloud, and we have purpose-built all the things to suit rather more density on these machines, you’ve a giant alternative.”
How 30 staff constructed a platform producing tens of tens of millions in annual income
Railway has achieved its scale with a group of simply 30 staff producing tens of tens of millions in annual income — a ratio of income per worker that might be distinctive even for established software program corporations. The corporate grew income 3.5 instances final yr and continues to increase at 15 % month-over-month.
Cooper emphasised that the fundraise was strategic moderately than essential. “We’re default alive; there isn’t any purpose for us to boost cash,” he mentioned. “We raised as a result of we see an enormous alternative to speed up, not as a result of we wanted to outlive.”
The corporate employed its first salesperson solely final yr and employs simply two options engineers. Almost all of Railway’s two million customers found the platform by means of phrase of mouth — builders telling different builders a couple of instrument that truly works.
“We principally did the usual engineering factor: in the event you construct it, they may come,” Cooper recalled. “And to some extent, they got here.”
From aspect initiatives to Fortune 500 deployments: Railway’s unlikely company enlargement
Regardless of its grassroots developer group, Railway has made important inroads into giant organizations. The corporate claims that 31 % of Fortune 500 corporations now use its platform, although deployments vary from company-wide infrastructure to particular person group initiatives.
Notable clients embrace Bilt, the loyalty program firm; Intuit’s GoCo subsidiary; TripAdvisor’s Cruise Critic; and MGM Resorts. Kernel, a Y Combinator-backed startup offering AI infrastructure to over 1,000 corporations, runs its total customer-facing system on Railway for $444 per 30 days.
“At my earlier firm Intelligent, which offered for $500 million, I had six full-time engineers simply managing AWS,” mentioned Rafael Garcia, Kernel’s chief expertise officer. “Now I’ve six engineers complete, they usually all concentrate on product. Railway is precisely the instrument I want I had in 2012.”
For enterprise clients, Railway presents safety certifications together with SOC 2 Sort 2 compliance and HIPAA readiness, with enterprise affiliate agreements accessible upon request. The platform offers single sign-on authentication, complete audit logs, and the choice to deploy inside a buyer’s present cloud atmosphere by means of a “deliver your personal cloud” configuration.
Enterprise pricing begins at customized ranges, with particular add-ons for prolonged log retention ($200 month-to-month), HIPAA BAAs ($1,000), enterprise assist with SLOs ($2,000), and devoted digital machines ($10,000).
The startup’s daring technique to tackle Amazon, Google, and a brand new era of cloud rivals
Railway enters a crowded market that features not solely the hyperscale cloud suppliers—Amazon Internet Companies, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform—but in addition a rising cohort of developer-focused platforms like Vercel, Render, Fly.io, and Heroku.
Cooper argues that Railway’s rivals fall into two camps, neither of which has absolutely dedicated to the brand new infrastructure mannequin that AI calls for.
“The hyperscalers have two competing methods, they usually have not gone all-in on the brand new mannequin as a result of their legacy income stream remains to be printing cash,” he noticed. “They’ve this mammoth pool of money coming from individuals who provision a VM, use perhaps 10 % of it, and nonetheless pay for the entire thing. To what finish are they really inquisitive about going all the way in which in on a brand new expertise if they do not really want to?”
In opposition to startup rivals, Railway differentiates by protecting the complete infrastructure stack. “We’re not simply containers; we have VM primitives, stateful storage, digital non-public networking, automated load balancing,” Cooper mentioned. “And we wrap all of this in an absurdly easy-to-use UI, with agentic primitives so brokers can transfer 1,000 instances quicker.”
The platform helps databases together with PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis; offers as much as 256 terabytes of persistent storage with over 100,000 enter/output operations per second; and permits deployment to 4 world areas spanning america, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Enterprise clients can scale to 112 vCPUs and a pair of terabytes of RAM per service.
Why traders are betting that AI will create a thousand instances extra software program than exists immediately
Railway’s fundraise displays broader investor enthusiasm for corporations positioned to learn from the AI coding revolution. As instruments like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude turn into normal fixtures in developer workflows, the amount of code being written — and the infrastructure wanted to run it — is increasing dramatically.
“The quantity of software program that is going to come back on-line over the subsequent 5 years is unfathomable in comparison with what existed earlier than — we’re speaking a thousand instances extra software program,” Cooper predicted. “All of that has to run someplace.”
The corporate has already built-in immediately with AI methods, constructing what Cooper calls “loops the place Claude can hook in, name deployments, and analyze infrastructure robotically.” Railway launched a Mannequin Context Protocol server in August 2025 that enables AI coding brokers to deploy functions and handle infrastructure immediately from code editors.
“The notion of a developer is melting earlier than our eyes,” Cooper mentioned. “You do not have to be an engineer to engineer issues anymore — you simply want vital considering and the flexibility to investigate issues in a methods capability.”
What Railway plans to do with $100 million and nil advertising and marketing expertise
Railway plans to make use of the brand new capital to increase its world information middle footprint, develop its group past 30 staff, and construct what Cooper described as a correct go-to-market operation for the primary time within the firm’s five-year historical past.
“One among my mentors mentioned you elevate cash when you possibly can change the trajectory of the enterprise,” Cooper defined. “We have constructed all of the required substrate to scale indefinitely; what’s been holding us again is solely speaking about it. 2026 is the yr we play on the world stage.”
The corporate’s investor roster reads like a who’s who of developer infrastructure. Angel traders embrace Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub; Guillermo Rauch, chief government of Vercel; Spencer Kimball, chief government of Cockroach Labs; Olivier Pomel, chief government of Datadog; and Jori Lallo, co-founder of Linear.
The timing of Railway’s enlargement coincides with what many in Silicon Valley view as a elementary shift in how software program will get made. Coding assistants are not experimental curiosities — they’ve turn into important instruments that tens of millions of builders depend on every day. Every line of AI-generated code wants someplace to run, and the incumbents, by Cooper’s telling, are too wedded to their present enterprise fashions to completely capitalize on the second.
Whether or not Railway can translate developer enthusiasm into sustained enterprise adoption stays an open query. The cloud infrastructure market is affected by promising startups that failed to interrupt the grip of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. However Cooper, who beforehand labored as a software program engineer at Wolfram Alpha, Bloomberg, and Uber earlier than founding Railway in 2020, appears unfazed by the dimensions of his ambition.
“In 5 years, Railway [will be] the place the place software program will get created and developed, interval,” he mentioned. “Deploy immediately, scale infinitely, with zero friction. That is the prize price taking part in for, and there isn’t any greater one on provide.”
For an organization that constructed a $100 million enterprise by doing the alternative of what typical startup knowledge dictates — no advertising and marketing, no gross sales group, no enterprise hype—the actual check begins now. Railway spent 5 years proving that builders would discover a higher mousetrap on their very own. The subsequent 5 will decide whether or not the remainder of the world is able to get on board.
