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

📌 MAROKO133 Hot ai: Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-native c

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 "The last generation of cloud primitives were slow and outdated, and now with AI moving everything faster, teams simply can't keep up."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.

"At my previous company Clever, which sold …

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com

📌 MAROKO133 Breaking ai: Engineered wood converts sunlight into heat, supplies sol

Solar energy has a simple but annoying weakness. It disappears when the sun does. Even the most efficient systems struggle with this basic reality—no sunlight means no power. Scientists have long tried to fix this by storing solar energy as heat, but doing it efficiently has proven tricky. 

Most designs rely on stacking different materials together—one to absorb sunlight, another to store heat, and then another to protect the system. These layers don’t work seamlessly, wasting energy at every boundary.

Now, researchers have taken a very different approach to overcome this problem. Instead of assembling multiple parts, they’ve turned wood into an all-in-one solar energy system. 

By redesigning its internal structure at the nanoscale, they’ve created a material that can absorb sunlight, store it as heat, and keep generating electricity even after the light is gone. 

“Our work presents a scalable and environmentally friendly wood-based platform for advanced solar thermal energy harvesting,” the researchers note in their study.

Rebuilding wood from the inside out

The researchers started with balsa wood, not for its strength, but for its internal architecture. Under a microscope, balsa looks like a bundle of aligned microtubes, each about 20–50 micrometers wide. These channels can guide heat and hold materials, making them a natural scaffold.

However, raw wood reflects sunlight and absorbs water. So the researchers first stripped the wood of lignin, the component that gives it color and rigidity. This delignification step boosted porosity above 93 percent, exposing a dense network of reactive surfaces inside the channels. 

Think of it as hollowing out the wood and turning it into a highly porous sponge—but one that still retains its directional structure. Next, instead of burning the wood (a common method called carbonization), they chemically engineered its inner surfaces. 

They coated the channel walls with ultrathin sheets of black phosphorene—a material that absorbs sunlight across ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths and converts it into heat. Unlike carbon, phosphorene also brings flame-retardant properties, but it has a weakness. It degrades quickly in the air.

To solve this, the researchers wrapped each nanosheet in a protective layer made from tannic acid and iron ions. This metal–polyphenol network acts like a molecular shield, preventing oxidation while also improving light absorption through charge-transfer effects. Even after 150 days of solar exposure, the coated material remained stable.

A durable, efficient, and waterproof storage system 

The team then added silver nanoparticles, which enhance light absorption through plasmonic effects—basically amplifying how the material interacts with sunlight. Finally, they grafted long hydrocarbon chains onto the surface, making it extremely water-repellent. The finished structure had a contact angle of 153°, meaning water simply rolls off.

With the scaffold ready, they filled the channels with stearic acid—a bio-based phase-change material. When heated, this substance melts and stores energy; when cooled, it solidifies and releases that energy. 

This stability translated directly into strong performance. It stored about 175 kJ of heat per kilogram, converted 91.27 percent of incoming sunlight into usable heat, conducted heat nearly 3.9 times more efficiently along the wood’s natural grain, and, when paired with a thermoelectric generator, produced up to 0.65 volts under standard one-sun illumination.

“As a proof of concept, stable solar–thermal–electric conversion is demonstrated with an output voltage of up to 0.65 V under one-sun irradiation,” the study authors note.

When sunlight hits the material, it heats up and melts the embedded stearic acid. When the light is removed, the stored heat is released gradually, maintaining a temperature difference across a thermoelectric generator. This allows the system to keep producing electricity even after the light source is gone.

Moreover, the material proved to be durable. After 100 heating–cooling cycles, its performance barely changed. It resisted burning by self-extinguishing within two minutes, and its antimicrobial surface prevented bacterial growth that could degrade performance outdoors.

Our design “integrates flame retardancy, superhydrophobicity, and antimicrobial activity, thereby mitigating dust adhesion and microbial colonization that would otherwise deteriorate the outdoor photothermal performance,” the study authors added. 

The big potential of wood-enabled solar storage

This work suggests a simple way to build a highly efficient solar system. Here, wood isn’t just a support structure; it absorbs sunlight, stores heat, and protects itself at the same time. 

Also, since the researchers avoided high-temperature carbonization, the material also keeps the chemical features needed for further tweaks.

Moreover, the idea could go beyond solar energy. Similar designs might help manage heat in electronics, improve energy-efficient building materials, or support small, off-grid power systems where reliability matters more than peak output.

However, these are future possibilities. First, the researchers need to make sure their system can work at scale while delivering desirable energy output. 

If successful, it could be adapted to other nanomaterials and biomass structures, giving rise to a new generation of solar power systems capable of capturing, storing, and managing energy on their own.

The study is published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com