Railway: The Agent-Native Cloud — Jake Cooper

About this episode

Jake Cooper discusses the evolution of Railway and its approach to AI infrastructure and software deployment.

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…

People in this episode

Guest: Jake Cooper

Topics covered

• AI infrastructure
• cloud computing
• software deployment
• startup growth
• user acquisition

Keywords

• Railway
• AI Engineering
• cloud outage
• software deployment
• user growth
• Jake Cooper
• GCP
• AWS
• startup

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Railway, GCP, AWS, Bloomberg, Uber

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