Intelligent cloud infrastructure startup Railway gets $100M to simplify application deployment – News

Railway Corp. says it’s going to make software deployment easier for thousands of developers after closing on $100 million in Series B funding today.

The round was led by TQ Ventures and saw the participation of FPV Ventures, Redpoint and Unusual Ventures, in support of Railway’s mission to make cloud infrastructure invisible.

The funding comes at a time when artificial intelligence-driven software development is accelerating so quickly that traditional cloud infrastructure platforms no longer can keep pace. The problem for developers is that, while AI models are getting better at writing code and doing it much faster than before, that doesn’t do much to help them figure out how and where to run their applications. According to Railway founder and Chief Executive Jake Cooper, the deployment side is extremely complex and involves a lot of manual work.

“The last generation of cloud primitives were slow and outdated, and now with AI moving everything faster, teams simply can’t keep up,” he explained. “We built Railway to let developers focus on building and creativity, not configuration. We stripped everything down and rebuilt both the software and hardware to make the experience truly seamless, and the response from developers has exceeded anything I imagined.”

With traditional cloud infrastructure platforms, developers are forced to navigate a maze of complex and cumbersome tools, creating operational overhead that slows down teams, leading to a bottleneck in development pipelines. Because of this, whatever benefits AI provides in terms of accelerating coding are undermined by a laboriously slow deployment process.

To overcome this bottleneck, Railway has built its own “intelligent cloud” infrastructure stack that consists of networking, compute, storage, orchestration software and hardware, enabling it to offer developers a “hands-off hosting experience” that’s fast and reliable. Cooper said Railway’s infrastructure independence proved its worth last year when cloud providers Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp. both suffered major outages, taking the websites and services of numerous global companies offline. Railway’s customers remained online while their competitors suffered.

Not only does Cooper claim Railway’s platform to be more reliable, he also says it’s more cost-efficient, as customers are only charged for the resources they use. This means they can avoid the usual markups charged by legacy cloud infrastructure providers, he said. Early adopters of Railway’s platform report a 10-fold increase in developer velocity while enjoying cost savings of up to 65%, he said. The platform caters to everything from simple web services to complex AI applications, and claims to eliminate all of the operational overhead.

It sounds like Railway is onto something, and its advantages have helped it to grab more than 2 million users globally. It claims that it’s growing at a rate of about 200,000 developers per month. Customers include 31% of the Fortune 500, including the likes of Ballarpur Industries Ltd., Profound Inc., Intuit Inc.’s GoCo, TripAdvisor LLC, MGM Resorts International and “thousands” of AI-native startups.

Cooper said Railway has achieved this level of growth with only a minimal marketing budget, because it has primarily focused on building out its platform, while attracting customers through word of mouth. “We’ve spent the last five years building quietly, with zero marketing, and somehow millions of developers found us,” he said. “This round lets us finally show the world our vision of how software should really be built, and we’re excited to supercharge all this with TQ’s unmatched enterprise customer introduction prowess.”

The funding will enable Railway to expand its global data center network, grow its team and develop newer tools for developers and AI systems, and help it to expand its reach with both enterprises and AI startups.

TQ Ventures co-founder Schuster Tanger said the primary attraction of Railway is the way it eliminates operational complexity for developers. “Railway’s Zero-Ops architecture has been purpose-built for an AI-native world and is dismantling the legacy systems that have slowed developers down over the past decade,” he said.

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