Founder stories
Cloud deployment platform that makes it easy for developers to deploy apps and services without infrastructure complexity.
How Jake acquired customers
Tools used to build Railway
After Uber sold Jump to Lime and laid off his team, Jake Cooper built Railway to solve the infrastructure headaches he kept running into with every project.
I started coding at 13, building first-person shooter games in C++. That early passion for building never left.
I was at Uber working on scaling infrastructure for Jump bikes and scooters. Then Uber sold Jump to Lime and my entire team got laid off. Instead of finding another job, I started building.
Every project I worked on had the same bottleneck: deploying even simple applications required deep infrastructure knowledge and often dedicated DevOps engineers. I wanted to solve that.
Railway gives engineers industry best practices for building and deploying apps automatically. No Kubernetes expertise required. No AWS certification needed. Just push your code.
We grew through the developer community. Our open-source template system lets anyone create and share deployment configs - and earn 25% of revenue from usage. It's created a flywheel of community contributions.
We raised $20M in our Series A to keep expanding the platform. The focus now: making Railway capable of handling Fortune 500 workloads while keeping the simplicity that developers love.
Getting laid off can be the push you need to finally build
Solve your own repeated frustrations - others likely share them
Community-driven growth through templates creates a flywheel
Start simple for startups then expand to enterprise
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Jake achieved 3 milestones on the path to $100K ARR
The journey, decisions, and context behind this milestone
See the complete breakdown: launch strategy, validation methods, startup costs, expert analysis, replication playbook, and more actionable insights.
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