MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-native cloud

📌 MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-na

Railway, a San Francisco-based cloud platform that has quietly amassed two million developers without spending a dollar on marketing, announced Thursday that it raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, as surging demand for artificial intelligence applications exposes the limitations of legacy cloud infrastructure.

TQ Ventures led the round, with participation from FPV Ventures, Redpoint, and Unusual Ventures. The investment values Railway as one of the most significant infrastructure startups to emerge during the AI boom, capitalizing on developer frustration with the complexity and cost of traditional platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

"As AI models get better at writing code, more and more people are asking the age-old question: where, and how, do I run my applications?" said Jake Cooper, Railway's 28-year-old founder and chief executive, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "The last generation of cloud primitives were slow and outdated, and now with AI moving everything faster, teams simply can't keep up."

The funding is a dramatic acceleration for a company that has charted an unconventional path through the cloud computing industry. Railway raised just $24 million in total before this round, including a $20 million Series A from Redpoint in 2022. The company now processes more than 10 million deployments monthly and handles over one trillion requests through its edge network — metrics that rival far larger and better-funded competitors.

Why three-minute deploy times have become unacceptable in the age of AI coding assistants

Railway's pitch rests on a simple observation: the tools developers use to deploy and manage software were designed for a slower era. A standard build-and-deploy cycle using Terraform, the industry-standard infrastructure tool, takes two to three minutes. That delay, once tolerable, has become a critical bottleneck as AI coding assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor can generate working code in seconds.

"When godly intelligence is on tap and can solve any problem in three seconds, those amalgamations of systems become bottlenecks," Cooper told VentureBeat. "What was really cool for humans to deploy in 10 seconds or less is now table stakes for agents."

The company claims its platform delivers deployments in under one second — fast enough to keep pace with AI-generated code. Customers report a tenfold increase in developer velocity and up to 65 percent cost savings compared to traditional cloud providers.

These numbers come directly from enterprise clients, not internal benchmarks. Daniel Lobaton, chief technology officer at G2X, a platform serving 100,000 federal contractors, measured deployment speed improvements of seven times faster and an 87 percent cost reduction after migrating to Railway. His infrastructure bill dropped from $15,000 per month to approximately $1,000.

"The work that used to take me a week on our previous infrastructure, I can do in Railway in like a day," Lobaton said. "If I want to spin up a new service and test different architectures, it would take so long on our old setup. In Railway I can launch six services in two minutes."

Inside the controversial decision to abandon Google Cloud and build data centers from scratch

What distinguishes Railway from competitors like Render and Fly.io is the depth of its vertical integration. In 2024, the company made the unusual decision to abandon Google Cloud entirely and build its own data centers, a move that echoes the famous Alan Kay maxim: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

"We wanted to design hardware in a way where we could build a differentiated experience," Cooper said. "Having full control over the network, compute, and storage layers lets us do really fast build and deploy loops, the kind that allows us to move at 'agentic speed' while staying 100 percent the smoothest ride in town."

The approach paid dividends during recent widespread outages that affected major cloud providers — Railway remained online throughout.

This soup-to-nuts control enables pricing that undercuts the hyperscalers by roughly 50 percent and newer cloud startups by three to four times. Railway charges by the second for actual compute usage: $0.00000386 per gigabyte-second of memory, $0.00000772 per vCPU-second, and $0.00000006 per gigabyte-second of storage. There are no charges for idle virtual machines — a stark contrast to the traditional cloud model where customers pay for provisioned capacity whether they use it or not.

"The conventional wisdom is that the big guys have economies of scale to offer better pricing," Cooper noted. "But when they're charging for VMs that usually sit idle in the cloud, and we've purpose-built everything to fit much more density on these machines, you have a big opportunity."

How 30 employees built a platform generating tens of millions in annual revenue

Railway has achieved its scale with a team of just 30 employees generating tens of millions in annual revenue — a ratio of revenue per employee that would be exceptional even for established software companies. The company grew revenue 3.5 times last year and continues to expand at 15 percent month-over-month.

Cooper emphasized that the fundraise was strategic rather than necessary. "We're default alive; there's no reason for us to raise money," he said. "We raised because we see a massive opportunity to accelerate, not because we needed to survive."

The company hired its first salesperson only last year and employs just two solutions engineers. Nearly all of Railway's two million users discovered the platform through word of mouth — developers telling other developers about a tool that actually works.

"We basically did the standard engineering thing: if you build it, they will come," Cooper recalled. "And to some degree, they came."

From side projects to Fortune 500 deployments: Railway's unlikely corporate expansion

Despite its grassroots developer community, Railway has made significant inroads into large organizations. The company claims that 31 percent of Fortune 500 companies now use its platform, though deployments range from company-wide infrastructure to individual team projects.

Notable customers include Bilt, the loyalty program company; Intuit's GoCo subsidiary; TripAdvisor's Cruise Critic; and MGM Resorts. Kernel, a Y Combinator-backed startup providing AI infrastructure to over 1,000 companies, runs its entire customer-facing system on Railway for $444 per month.

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: US Navy-certified rescue submarine can reach stranded crews

A new rescue submarine has been cleared for global emergency deployment after the US Navy carried out a series of deep-sea trials to validate its ability to operate under extreme underwater conditions.

The novel Submarine Rescue Diving and Recompression System (SRDRS) received the approval after completing a final manned dive on March 6 to a depth of 2,000 feet, near Naval Air Station North Island, off the coast of San Diego, California.

It marked the end of a multi-year development and testing initiative led by the US Navy Undersea Rescue Command (URC). It also involved Submarine Squadron 11, the US Pacific Fleet’s Submarine Force, Submarine Forces, the Program Executive Office Attack Submarines, Naval Sea Systems Command, as well as the Undersea Special Missions Program Office (PMS 390).

“This successful dive signifies a major milestone for the Navy,” Jonathan Rucker, Rear Admiral and Program Executive Officer for Attack Submarines, pointed out.

New rescue system cleared

The SRDRS system is remotely operated. It is also equipped to rescue stranded submarine crews during emergencies, and has the ability to deploy anywhere in the world within 96 hours.

With the successful certification, the URC is now authorized to support submarine rescue missions globally, and join an international network of experts ready to respond when needed.

Rucker emphasized the undersea community operates under very high standards. “Going through this process shows that the team is ready to meet and exceed those standards,” he added. “This accomplishment is a direct result of the whole team’s dedication.”

The Navy said the system is a primary undersea rescue asset designed to support US and allied operations worldwide. Its core component, the Pressurized Rescue Module (PRM), is a tethered, remotely operated vehicle that can rescue up to 16 personnel per mission.

This, according to the team, offers a critical lifeline in scenarios where crews are trapped deep below the ocean surface. “Our Submarine Force operates, along with our allies and partners, in challenging undersea environments that span the entire globe,” Chris Cavanaugh, Rear Admiral and commander of the Submarine Force US Pacific Fleet, said.

A life-saving technology

Cavanaugh stated that strong undersea rescue capability is vital for training and global response to distressed submarine. “I commend the team of experts that helped us to achieve this important certification and to maintain our legacy of safe operations beneath the seas,” he added.

Meanwhile, as per David McGlone, Captain and Program Manager for PMS 390, being aboard the PRM during its 2,000-foot certification dive emphasized its effectiveness and the team’s expertise.

“The equipment is complex, and the crew operating and maintaining it must be experts at what they do,” he stated in a press release. “Being here, observing the team at work, diving in the vehicle, seeing the entire system operate to perform its intended function – I can confidently say I’m impressed.”

The SRDRS underwent two dives. During the first one, it submerged unmanned to a depth of 2,000 feet. It then underwent a review process, and submerged again with a crew to the Deep Seat mating fixture.

“URC personnel, comprised of active and reserve component Sailors, and civilian contractors, operate the SRDRS as the US Navy’s only submarine rescue-capable command,” the Navy concluded.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com