📌 TOPINDIATOURS Update ai: Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-n

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 "The last generation of cloud primitives were slow and outdated, and now with AI moving everything faster, teams simply can't keep up."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

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Breaking ai: James Webb Takes Long, Hard Look Inside Uranus Wajib

Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, has only been visited once by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, which performed a flyby of the ice giant in 1986. It came within just tens of thousands of miles of the planet’s cloud tops, where it appeared as a surprisingly “drab” light-blue orb in the blackness of space, over a billion miles from Earth.

Now, thanks to recent observations by NASA’s groundbreaking James Webb Space Telescope, we’re getting an unprecedented peek inside the layers of its upper atmosphere.

The observatory’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument observed Uranus for almost a full rotation just over a year ago, showing how the planet’s ionosphere, a thin layer in the planet’s upper atmosphere that’s ionized by solar radiation, is interacting with its magnetic field.

It’s the most detailed picture of the planet’s atmosphere yet, demonstrating where auroras form on its surface. It also sheds light on the planet’s unusually tilted magnetic field. Uranus is the only planet whose equator is almost at a right angle to its orbit, an astonishing tilt of 97.77 degrees. Its magnetic axis, on the other hand, has a large tilt relative to its rotation axis, making its magnetosphere a significant outlier compared to other planets.

“This is the first time we’ve been able to see Uranus’s upper atmosphere in three dimensions,” said Northumbria University PhD student Paola Tiranti, lead author of a new paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, in a statement. “With Webb’s sensitivity, we can trace how energy moves upward through the planet’s atmosphere and even see the influence of its lopsided magnetic field.”

The latest findings also support existing theories that Uranus’ upper atmosphere is still cooling, a trend that was first observed in the early 1990s, when near-infrared observations began.

Thanks to the planet’s unusual tilt, auroras act in a surprisingly different way. As on Earth, Uranian auroras are the result of charged particles from the Sun colliding with atmospheric gases, causing dancing colors to appear in the night sky. But while they’re most commonly seen around our world’s north and south poles, the situation is drastically different on Uranus.

“Uranus’s magnetosphere is one of the strangest in the Solar System,” Tiranti explained. “It’s tilted and offset from the planet’s rotation axis, which means its auroras sweep across the surface in complex ways.”

In the case of Uranus, auroras appear as glowing patches of orange and red light that extend past the edges visible in JWST observations.

“These auroral detections are hugely important because they are a direct manifestation of the planet’s internal magnetic field,” JWST interdisciplinary scientist Heidi Hammel, who was not involved in the study, told Scientific American. “We really have no other way to probing the magnetic field remotely without a spacecraft in situ.”

The findings could inform future visits to the distant ice giant. But when we’ll have a chance to get another, closer look four decades after Voyager 2’s flyby remains as uncertain as ever. Tight budgets have endangered interplanetary missions as of late, and it remains to be seen whether a trip to Uranus will still be in the cards in the coming years.

“Webb has now shown us how deeply those effects reach into the atmosphere,” Tiranti said in the statement. “By revealing Uranus’s vertical structure in such detail, Webb is helping us understand the energy balance of the ice giants. This is a crucial step towards characterising giant planets beyond our Solar System.”

More on Uranus: Scientists Say That Uranus Appears to Have a Girlfriend

The post James Webb Takes Long, Hard Look Inside Uranus appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com