Fly.io CEO Scott Johnston 说:「每一次平台转变,事后看都显而易见,当下却都有争议;我近距离见过几次,这一次也是同样的形状。agent 是人的新界面,它们需要一台属于自己的真正的电脑。谁把这层基础设施做对,谁就定义下一个十年的计算。Fly 多年来一直朝这个方向建设,我加入是为了帮忙把这个品类做起来,把推动它的公司做大。」
Fly.io 创始人 Kurt Mackey 说:「我们创办 Fly.io 时觉得,开发者不应该在强大的基础设施和好用的配置之间二选一。所以我们做的软件,用起来像真正的电脑。AI agent 的兴起只意味着,我们比以往更需要强大又好用的基础设施;要做到这一点,我们需要高度的专注和速度。Scott 是实现这一点的合适人选。」
Fly.io 打造给 agent 的电脑:为 AI agent 及其构建的应用设计的互联基础设施。不同于用完即弃的执行环境,Fly.io 给 agent 真正的电脑:有持久的磁盘、能安全连接其他系统,还能扩展到数百万个实例,支撑生产级 AI 应用。超过 3.7 万家客户里的数十万开发者,用 Fly.io 支撑生产应用。
After Heroku: Render leads, Railway has to fix its reliability, Fly is betting agents need computers of their own
Render, Railway, Fly.io · 2026-09-18
Fixing reliability is a surer thing than waiting for new demand to appear: Railway's problems are known, while the demand Fly is betting on is still unproven.
Indigo's conclusion
Render won today's scale with production-grade reliability, but at roughly 50–70 times revenue it's priced for growth and prospects. Railway's risk is execution: whether it can fix its reliability. Fly's risk is demand: whether “computers for agents” is a real category. Execution risk is more controllable than category risk.
How to read this The text is the three companies' own funding announcements (Railway in January, Render in February, Fly in July); the notes come from Indigo's competitive survey in September. The survey's revenue and valuation figures are mostly third-party estimates and secondary-market marks, and growth figures like “12 times” are the companies' own claims: good enough for the lay of the land, not due diligence.
What to remember
None of the three does GPUs or training; they're betting on the agent execution and deployment layer, where the flood of small services written by people and agents will run.
Building your own and fragility are the same coin: Railway's own hardware bought price and speed, and on May 19 a Google account suspension took it down for eight hours.
Render earns a premium for production-grade reliability, but at 50–70 times revenue, and its sandbox foundations are a generation behind Fly's.
Don't lump DigitalOcean in: it sells virtual machines you run yourself, Railway sells a platform that hides the servers, and they overlap only in a small corner.
Breakdown · 3 steps
01
Render: scale in hand, betting on an AI runtime
A $100M Series C extension at a $1.5B valuation, with 4.5 million developers. Next comes an integrated runtime for agents: workflows, storage, managed sandboxes, an AI gateway. Read this part →
02
Railway: a $100M Series B for an intelligent cloud
Instant deploys and automatic fixes for people and their agents; software and hardware built in-house, 2 million developers. Almost all vision, almost no numbers. Read this part →
03
Fly.io: a new CEO and a bigger bet on computers for agents
A $25M Series D and Docker's former CEO in charge; more than 8,000 of 37,000 customers are agent-native, and revenue from the largest of them grew nearly 12 times in a year. Read this part →
What would change my mind
Railway moves its control plane off GCP onto multiple clouds in the second half and its incidents drop sharply, or Fly's “computers for agents” becomes the standard option in agent purchasing.
How to read this
The text is the three companies' own funding announcements (Railway in January, Render in February, Fly in July); the notes come from Indigo's competitive survey in September. The survey's revenue and valuation figures are mostly third-party estimates and secondary-market marks, and growth figures like “12 times” are the companies' own claims: good enough for the lay of the land, not due diligence.
A $100M Series C extension at a $1.5B valuation, with 4.5 million developers. Next comes an integrated runtime for agents: workflows, storage, managed sandboxes, an AI gateway.
Render blog, February 17, 2026: Render raises $100M at $1.5B valuation
I'm thrilled to announce that Render has raised $100M in an extension of our Series C, valuing the company at $1.5B, as reported this morning by CNBC.
Led by Georgian, who also led our Series C, the round includes strong participation from all our major partners, including Addition, Bessemer, General Catalyst, and 01A, and brings our total funding to $258M.
With 4.5 million+ developers now on Render and more than 250,000 new developers joining every month, Render has evolved into one of the fastest-growing developer platforms in the world, and this capital will help us support our customers and expand Render’s offerings during a period of unprecedented hypergrowth.
But this milestone isn’t just about scaling what exists; it’s about fueling the next frontier: building the cloud runtime for AI applications and agents.
Software creation has fundamentally changed in the last few months. Code is abundant, and lean teams can conceive, build, and iterate on features instantly.
But while writing code has leaped into the future, the infrastructure for shipping and scaling it remains anchored in the past. The bottleneck is no longer human imagination or typing speed; it is the labyrinth of deployment, scaling, and reliability.
This problem is especially acute for AI applications and agents.
The natural home for AI builders
Traditional web apps rely on short-lived, stateless request-response cycles. AI agents are the opposite: they are long-running, stateful, and distributed. They require unbounded execution times, complex memory management, persistent file systems, and durable workflows.
Building these systems on hyperscalers is complex and expensive, while frontend-focused serverless platforms are too limiting for this new execution model.
Render’s architecture is built for this new world. With native support for long-running processes, private networking, WebSockets, enterprise-grade Postgres and Redis, and infrastructure-as-code, Render already provides a frictionless foundation for AI.
This is why thousands of AI companies have already migrated to Render. A prime example is Base44, one of the world’s most popular AI-coding platforms. Here's what they have to say:
“We've been able to deliver AI features much faster with a very lean engineering team, and Render’s flexibility and reliability have scaled to meet our rapidly evolving needs. After using their platform over the last year, I’m convinced Render is the future of the cloud. Their latest round gave me a chance to invest in their trajectory, and the opportunity was too good to pass up.”
A consolidated AI runtime
Base44 and others face complex infrastructure sprawl. Today, engineers building production-grade LLM applications are forced to stitch together a fragmented mess of vendors for sandboxes, vector stores, workflows, storage, and observability, just to get a single agent running.
Render is ending this fragmentation.
We are building a fully integrated platform that enables every AI developer to bring their applications to market quickly, confidently, and at scale. In the coming months, we will augment our platform with application-level capabilities purpose-built for this new era:
Workflows: A durable execution and compute layer to orchestrate everything from agent-based loops to data pipelines, setting the standard for asynchronous computing.
Native object storage: Deeply integrated with our global CDN and runtime.
Managed sandboxes: Secure, policy-driven code execution for development and production.
Shared filesystem: Persistent context for complex agent orchestration.
AI gateway: Observability, resilience, cost management, and model routing.
Unified observability: Traces, metrics, and logs across the entire stack.
…and much more as we continue to learn from our customers.
Build the future with us
AI has already revolutionized the software development lifecycle, and companies are leveraging it to build products faster and leaner than ever before. Builders, whether human or machine, will need infrastructure that matches their cadence, and the next million big ideas will be launched on a cloud that's purpose-built for this generation.
This is what we’re building at Render.
The future is arriving sooner than anyone expects.
02
Railway: a $100M Series B for an intelligent cloud
Instant deploys and automatic fixes for people and their agents; software and hardware built in-house, 2 million developers. Almost all vision, almost no numbers.
Railway blog, January 22, 2026: Railway raises $100M Series B to unburden the builders
We’ve raised $100M to remove the burden from building, starting with your software applications.
Our goal is simple: we want to take everything off your plate so that you can focus on only two things; building beautiful things, or spending time experiencing the richness life has to offer.
We’re doing that by building the world’s first intelligent cloud provider.
One that allows you, or your agents, to deploy instantly, scale infinitely, automatically fix issues, and ship at the speed of thought.
Develop, Deploy, Diagnose, repeat.
We believe in peaceful, powerful infrastructure. A smooth way to ship applications, a friendly guide to help you scale them, and calmness should intervention be required. We believe every builder is owed.
Because the last generation of clouds asks too much of you. They chain you to a desk. They weigh you down with DevOps to scale your app, FinOps to make sure you don’t go bankrupt, and SecOps to make sure you don’t leak data. When things break, alarms sound, chaos ensues, and panic spreads like a virus.
We believe this model causes anxiety, suffering, and anger. We believe life doesn’t have to be this way. We believe a better future is possible.
We’ve built software and hardware from scratch to unburden, unlock, and unleash builders. 2 million, and counting, and tens of thousands of companies, from small mom and pop shops to Fortune 500s.
We aim to provide a frictionless experience to will your creative endeavors into existence. We believe a perpetual flow state is possible.
We aspire to live in a world of rich tastes, colors, and experiences. We think it’s very difficult to do this drudging through the monotony of poor tooling, tied to your monitor, consuming the same greyscale slop as everybody else.
It is our opinion that a future of greyscale slop is neither compelling, nor good for humanity.
Our hope is, if we can support your applications, you will have more time to enjoy life’s rich experiences, and those experiences will translate to rich creative endeavors that you can share with the world to ultimately inspire others.
With the tooling we’re building, we hope to allow you to raise your ambitions, to build things larger than you ever thought humanly possible.
This is the future we’re building towards.
Onwards, towards a world of rich tastes.
03
Fly.io: a new CEO and a bigger bet on computers for agents
A $25M Series D and Docker's former CEO in charge; more than 8,000 of 37,000 customers are agent-native, and revenue from the largest of them grew nearly 12 times in a year.
Fly.io news, July 24, 2026: Fly.io doubles down on computers for agents with $25M
Funding, customer adoption, and new CEO Scott Johnston accelerate Fly.io’s vision for infrastructure purpose-built for AI agents and the applications they build.
SAN FRANCISCO — July 24, 2026 — AI agents are transforming how software is built and deployed. For nearly a decade, Fly.io has helped developers build and run software. Now, as agents increasingly build, operate, and deploy software alongside people, Fly.io recognizes that AI agents require a fundamentally different kind of infrastructure than the disposable execution environments that defined the first wave of AI.
Fly.io is doubling down on computers for agents — connected infrastructure designed for AI agents and the applications they build. Fly.io gives agents real computers that have durable disk drives, secure connectivity to other systems, and the ability to scale to millions of instances to power production AI applications.
Fly.io just closed its strongest quarter in company history, driven almost entirely by agent workloads. More than 37,000 customers build on Fly.io, and more than 8,000 of them are agent-native. Over the past 12 months, revenue from the company’s largest agent-native customers has grown nearly 12 times. Among the company’s largest customers overall, agent-native companies now represent approximately two-thirds of revenue. Agent-first companies like Firecrawl, Kilocode, and Plastic Labs use Fly.io to build production AI applications that run continuously and perform real work.
To accelerate this opportunity, Fly.io also announced $25 million in Series D funding co-led by Dell Technologies Capital and Intel Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, EQT, Geodesic, and YC. Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and Daniel Docter, managing director at Dell Technologies Capital, will join the company’s board of directors. The investment will accelerate Fly.io’s leadership in computers for agents as organizations increasingly build and deploy production agentic AI applications.
Fly.io also announced that Scott Johnston has joined as CEO and a member of the board. Johnston previously served as CEO of Docker and held leadership roles at Puppet, Loudcloud, and Netscape, helping scale infrastructure platforms through major shifts in software development. Founder Kurt Mackey will remain on Fly.io’s board and transition to an advisory role, continuing to help shape the company’s long-term technical vision.
“We evaluated a number of platforms for running agents, but Fly was the only one that treated long-running, stateful compute as a first-class primitive rather than something bolted on,” said Moin Nadeem, co-founder of Phonic. “Being able to run agent environments close to data and inference is exactly the foundation our product depends on. Fly is building the execution layer the agent ecosystem actually needs, and that’s why we’re betting on them.”
“Every wave of infrastructure is defined by who its primary user is, and for the first time that user isn’t necessarily a person. That changes what a computer has to look like,” said Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Fly has spent years building infrastructure for that shift and is giving agents real computers instead of disposable sandboxes. We believed in that path early, and we think Fly is the platform on which this gets built.”
“Every platform shift looks obvious in hindsight and contested in the moment — and having seen a few up close, this has the same shape. Agents — the new interface for people — need real computers of their own. Whoever gets that infrastructure right will define the next decade of computing,” said Scott Johnston, CEO of Fly.io. “Fly has been building toward this for years, and I joined to help build the category and scale the company driving it.”
“When we started Fly.io, we felt devs shouldn’t have to choose between infra that was powerful and a setup that was easy to use. That’s the reason we built software that feels like real computers,” said Kurt Mackey, founder of Fly.io. “The rise of AI agents just means we need powerful, easy infra even more than we did before, and we’re going to need serious focus and speed to get there. Scott is the right person to make that happen.”
Fly.io builds computers for agents — connected infrastructure designed for AI agents and the applications they build. Unlike disposable execution environments, Fly.io gives agents real computers that have durable disk drives, secure connectivity to other systems, and the ability to scale to millions of instances to power production AI applications. Hundreds of thousands of developers across more than 37,000 customers use Fly.io to power production applications.
Where Indigo landsFurther
Indigo's conclusion
Render won today's scale with production-grade reliability, but at roughly 50–70 times revenue it's priced for growth and prospects. Railway's risk is execution: whether it can fix its reliability. Fly's risk is demand: whether “computers for agents” is a real category. Execution risk is more controllable than category risk.
What to remember
None of the three does GPUs or training; they're betting on the agent execution and deployment layer, where the flood of small services written by people and agents will run.
Building your own and fragility are the same coin: Railway's own hardware bought price and speed, and on May 19 a Google account suspension took it down for eight hours.
Render earns a premium for production-grade reliability, but at 50–70 times revenue, and its sandbox foundations are a generation behind Fly's.
Don't lump DigitalOcean in: it sells virtual machines you run yourself, Railway sells a platform that hides the servers, and they overlap only in a small corner.
Back on the long-running theses
confirms
Constraints are shifting from algorithms to physics (power, memory, atoms) Railway's own hardware and Fly's own servers: value sinking from software abstractions toward who owns the hardware and interconnect, with high margins and single points of failure arriving together.
adds to
archerhume: Jev’s Architecture Unmasked Both are tollgates in the agent engineering stack: Jev holds the decision layer, while Fly's Sprites and E2B hold the execution layer, the isolated computer itself.
Railway moves its control plane off GCP onto multiple clouds in the second half and its incidents drop sharply, or Fly's “computers for agents” becomes the standard option in agent purchasing.
Finished. Indigo's take on this piece is in two places: