Railway is a cloud platform that deploys applications, databases, and background services directly from a Git repository without requiring the user to configure the infrastructure underneath. Founded in 2020 by Jake Cooper, it provisions containers, networking, and managed databases automatically and meters billing against actual consumption — CPU, memory, and egress — rather than against provisioned instance size.
Railway sits between the platform-as-a-service simplicity of 📝Heroku, whose users it courted directly as that platform's free tier wound down, and the control of raw primitives on AWS or Google Cloud. Where 📝Vercel optimizes for frontend and edge delivery, Railway targets the whole backend — long-running services, workers, scheduled jobs, and stateful databases arranged as one project graph the user can see and wire together. The company raised a $20 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures in 2022 and a $100 million Series B led by TQ Ventures in January 2026, framing AI-era workloads — agents, inference services, bursty compute — as the pressure that existing cloud abstractions handle badly. Angel backers include Vercel's Guillermo Rauch and GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner.