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.
In October 2026 Railway disclosed the most serious security incident in its history. Builds stalled on October 20, and shortly after midnight Pacific on October 21 the dashboard, API, and CLI went down while builds were paused in every region. That afternoon the company announced that an unauthorized party had accessed the systems storing customer environment variables and may have obtained decrypted values for a subset of them, including API keys, database credentials, and private registry tokens. Railway told every customer to rotate every secret stored on the platform, invalidated all Railway API tokens, rotated storage-bucket credentials, and said it had alerted AI inference providers so they could revoke exposed keys. It described the intrusion as part of a broader campaign against platform companies aimed at reaching those providers. Builds returned in stages on October 22, Enterprise and Pro first, with no root cause yet published.
We ran the expanded build of 📝MythOS on Railway for about a year before migrating to 📝Amazon Web Services (AWS). The October 2026 breach was egregious: 📝Anthropic warned us one of our API keys was compromised before Railway told us anything, and keeping our secrets safe is exactly what we were paying Railway for.