Railway: The Agent-Native Cloud — Jake Cooper
type: NewsArticle
description: Railway founder Jake Cooper is building a new cloud infrastructure platform designed for an agent-native world, moving the majority of workloads onto the company's own bare metal data centers with 70% margins and a three-month payback period. The 35-person company now supports 3 million users and adds roughly 100,000 signups per week, after surviving a period of losing $500,000 per month. Cooper argues that the traditional deployment loop of Git, pull requests, and static cloud resources is heading for a rewrite as agents become the dominant software species.
date published: 2026-05-20 22:42:06+00:00
date modified: 2026-05-25 00:18:59.514475+00:00
language: en
is accessible for free: true
article body: *Take the 2026 AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and AIE WF tickets!* *This was recorded before Railway suffered a major GCP outage on May 19, despite being a multi-AZ, multi-zone mesh ring, with HA fiber interconnects between their Metal <> GCP <> AWS, because workload discoverability was unintentionally still tied to GCP. All has been resolved with a post-mortem.* Railway **did not** start as an AI infrastructure company. It was founded in 2020 years before agents became the default way people thought about deploying software. **Jake Cooper**, formerly at Bloomberg and Uber, started Railway with a simple obsession: **the activation energy to ship something to production should be near zero.** Push code, get a URL, iterate. No Docker files, no Kubernetes manifests, no Ansible scripts stacked on Ansible scripts. For years, this was a slow grind. Railway spent its **first 18 months hand-acquiring its first 100 users** with Jake personally greeting every Discord signup on a second monitor. Today, Railway has raised **$124m **and is growing very fast. **A 35-person team supports 3 million users, adding roughly 100,000 signups a week.** Their bare metal data centers have a 3-month payback period vs. renting in the cloud, with **70% margins** funding aggressive cloud bursting when needed. The servers they own have actually appreciated in value as RAM prices have climbed basically meaning the **value of their hardware now exceeds the capital they've raised.** From rebuilding Railway’s network overlay over a weekend to moving the vast majority of workloads onto its own ** bare metal data centers**, **Jake Cooper** is trying to build a **new cloud for an agent-native world**. In this episode, Railway’s founder and “conductor” joins swyx and Alessio to unpack why the next era of software infrastructure is not just [“](https://blog.railway.com/p/heroku-walked-railway-run) **what agents need that humans did not, and why the old deployment loop of Git, PRs, CI/CD, a…
publisher: Web Pulse
keywords: ai-infrastructure, ai-startups, ai-products, ai-tools, mlops
mentions: Railway
mentions: Jake Cooper
mentions: Bloomberg
mentions: Uber
mentions: GCP
mentions: AWS
citation: CreativeWork