📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-nati

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 "The last generation of cloud primitives were slow and outdated, and now with AI moving everything faster, teams simply can't keep up."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

Konten dipersingkat otomatis.

🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: Under 6,000-year-old ditch, elusive medieval erdstall tunn

Archaeologists in Germany unearthed yet another mysterious underground erdstall tunnel, one of the most enigmatic archaeological phenomena of medieval Central Europe.

Back in late 2025, Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie (LDA) of Saxony-Anhalt set forth to excavate a stretch of land east of Reinstedt to ensure that the construction of a wind farm wouldn’t rip up irreplaceable traces of the past.

First, uncovering a large trapezoidal Neolithic ditch, they soon discovered that more lay hidden beneath the surface. In the southern section, they noticed a stone slab resting near an oval pit measuring about 2 feet and 5.53 inches.

At first, archaeologists thought they stumbled upon a grave, but once they started digging, they uncovered a 3.28-foot-tall Edrstall, or an underground tunnel also 19.7 to 27.6 inches wide.

Widespread across Europe, thousands of these medieval underground galleries exist, suggesting an “astonishingly uniform” and widespread cultural practice, according to LBV, though their function remains elusive, as these extremely tight, empty passageways are typically devoid of any markers of their purpose.

A bizarre underground hideout

First mentioned in the tax records of Asparn, Austria, in 1449, edrstalls sound like something out of a movie, as if medieval individuals navigated these chambers first down a carved step, and through a small wall niche, with torches.

However, all archaeologists found in this intriguing passage were an iron horseshoe, a fox skeleton, and mammal bones — a puzzling assortment. At the lowest level, as per Archaeology News, they found evidence of “a brief, low-intensity fire.” Stonewere s stacked together at the narrowest point of the entrance, suggesting that access to the tunnel had been deliberately blocked.

The material evidence suggests the tunnel dates between the 10^th and 13^th centuries. But why the “secret passageway” under a Neolithic site? Archaeologists were completely confused. Why would someone dig such a bizarre underground hideout?

The Middle Ages strikes again: bizarre and cultish

These questions led archaeologists to theorize that these underground tunnels were built to offer protection. Or, medieval folk might have understood this site to be an ancient pagan tomb, imbuing it with intrigue, fear, and awe, thereby turning it into a location where even illicit activity might have taken place. Was this a site of cultish rituals?

Thousands of these edrstalls have been found, and they exhibit the same layout — modestly sized, and rarely more than 164 feet in length. And given its compact construction, only someone with a small build could navigate the passage by hunching over or shifting sideways, presenting an awkward picture.  

Some of these tunnels are complex in structure, with “several connected levels leading to terminal chambers,” with “parallel inbound and outbound passages,” as per LBV. And even more perplexing feature: a “Schlupf,” or an even narrower section that would have required crawling.

Though archaeologists haven’t confirmed any of the theories, some have postulated a symbolic function, a site of initiation rituals, or spiritual retreats. Typically, they’re located in the basements of old farmhouses, near churches, cemeteries, or remote forests — continuing to layer mystery upon some collective, secretive purpose. Was there some sect yet to be identified?

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com