Startups on Rails in Past, Present and Future–Irina Nazarova, RailsConf 2025

by Irina Nazarova

Slide 1

Slide 1 text

RAIL NF IRINA NAZAROVA STARTUPS ON RAILS IN PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Slide 2

Slide 2 text

2 ON THE NEWS

Slide 3

Slide 3 text

3 Ryan King Co-founder&CTO San Francisco IPO

Slide 4

Slide 4 text

4 Ryan King Co-founder&CTO San Francisco plans an IPO March 3, 2025 June 12, 2025

Slide 5

Slide 5 text

5 Stack: Ruby, Sinatra, Active Record, WebAssembly, Go, Rust filed for IPO Dylan Field San Francisco June, 2025

Slide 6

Slide 6 text

Albert Pai and Eric Simmons Co-founders San Francisco 6 Stack: Remix, Wasm, Anthtopic, Rails $ 40M ARR in 5 months May, 2025

Slide 7

Slide 7 text

7 Albert Pai and Eric Simmons Co-founders San Francisco ran world’s largest hackathon June, 2025

Slide 8

Slide 8 text

8 Jack Sharkey Co-founder, CTO New York Stack: Rails, Next.js reached $ 1.4B transaction volume June, 2025 400000000 800000000 1200000000 1600000000 April 2021 April 2022 April 2023 April 2024 April 2025

Slide 9

Slide 9 text

Nikita Savrov co-founder&CTO Maryland, US 9 Feb, 2025 raised $ 150M🤯

Slide 10

Slide 10 text

Front page of HN Carmine Paolino Author, founder Chatwithwork Berlin 10 March, 2025

Slide 11

Slide 11 text

11 YC partner pitches Rails March, 2025

Slide 12

Slide 12 text

12 SO, WHERE ARE WE? Startups on Rails are growing Ruby open source is getting popular Investors support Rails

Slide 13

Slide 13 text

13 Peak of in fl ated expectations Visibility of Technology Trough of disillusionment Slope of enlightenm ent Plateau of productivity Pragmatic adoption Gartner Hype Cycle Time

Slide 14

Slide 14 text

14 Peak of in fl ated expectations Visibility of Technology Trough of disillusionment Slope of enlightenm ent Plateau of productivity Pragmatic adoption Gartner Hype Cycle Time PAST FUTURE ✨ PRESENT

Slide 15

Slide 15 text

15 Hi! I’m Irina (Ira) Nazarova CEO at Evil Martians Co-founder at AnyCable Org of SF Ruby meetup and…

Slide 16

Slide 16 text

Slide 17

Slide 17 text

17 LET’S TALK!

Slide 18

Slide 18 text

Slide 19

Slide 19 text

19 ➡ Ruby on Rails startup ➡ YC S08 ⚡ ➡ WebSockets powered by Brad Gessler Co-founder San Francisco 🔌 Terminalwire beautifulruby.com

Slide 20

Slide 20 text

Slide 21

Slide 21 text

Slide 22

Slide 22 text

Slide 23

Slide 23 text

23 PLEASURE TO MEET YOU!

Slide 24

Slide 24 text

24 STARTUPS ON RUBY/RAILS AND THEIR TECH FOUNDERS

Slide 25

Slide 25 text

Slide 26

Slide 26 text

26 LET’S GO BACK IN TIME!

Slide 27

Slide 27 text

Rails 1.0 15-min blog by DHH goes viral Capistrano RailsConf Rails 2 Rspec Devise Resque Rails 3, merged w Merb Bundler, Factory Bot Y Combinator Shopify Meraki Twitter Heroku Zendesk Nitro (Powerhome) Github Airbnb Twitter starts migrating o f Stripe Doximity Heroku acq by Salesforce 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 27 90% of YC batches are on Rails–hype

Slide 28

Slide 28 text

Sprockets Sidekiq Rails 4. Turbolinks Gitlab Intercom Chime Figma Gusto Instacart Coinbase Meraki acq by CIsco Twitter IPO Zendesk IPO Shopify IPO Uscreen 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 28 Astrologists: start a Rails company!

Slide 29

Slide 29 text

Rails 5. Action Cable, Stimulus AnyCable Falcon TestProf Sorbet Rails 6 Packwerk Stackblitz (future bolt.new) 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 29 De fl ated expectations and visibility Companies start investing in the ecosystem

Slide 30

Slide 30 text

Rails 7, Hotwire YJIT Neighbor Rails 8 Hotwire Native Gitlab IPO Coinbase IPO Doximity IPO Whop GIthub acq by Microsoft Instacart IPO Chime IPO Figma fi led for IPO 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 30 Growing adoption and visibility

Slide 31

Slide 31 text

31 BACK TO THE PRESENT

Slide 32

Slide 32 text

Slide 33

Slide 33 text

Slide 34

Slide 34 text

Slide 35

Slide 35 text

35 Startup Jobs

Slide 36

Slide 36 text

36 WHY RUBY AND RAILS?

Slide 37

Slide 37 text

37 “I LOVE RUBY” Dylan Field Ruby

Slide 38

Slide 38 text

38 “SOMETHING I SPENT HALF A YEAR BUILDING WITH JAVA, I BUILT IN ONLY 2 MONTHS… WHEN LEARNING RAILS” Thiago Diniz Time to Market

Slide 39

Slide 39 text

39 “AFTER TRYING SCALA AND OTHER FRAMEWORKS, RAILS ALLOWED ME TO FOCUS ON BUSINESS LOGIC RATHER THAN CONFIGURATION” Bjarke Vad Andersen Convention over configuration

Slide 40

Slide 40 text

40 “RAILS SERVED US THE BEST WHEN WE WERE MAKING A LOT OF TWISTS AND TURNS, FIGURING OUT OUR PRODUCT.” Ryan King Perfect for rapid iterations

Slide 41

Slide 41 text

41 “RAILS IS THE GROWN - UP IN THE ROOM: IT IS BATTLE - TESTED WITH YEARS AND YEARS OF CARE PUT INTO IT” Trent Kocurek Battle-Tested Reliability

Slide 42

Slide 42 text

42 “RAILS DEVS TEND TO TAKE ON PM TASKS AND UNDERSTAND THE BUSINESS NEEDS” Aaron Snyder Entrepreneurial culture

Slide 43

Slide 43 text

43 “RUBY IS OVER - REPRESENTED IN THE STARTUPS THAT GOT SUCCESSFUL” Kelly Sutton Startup Success Correlation

Slide 44

Slide 44 text

44 “EVENTUALLY PEOPLE WILL REALIZE THAT THESE SUCCESSFUL COMPANIES HAVE BEEN BUILDING ON RAILS ALL ALONG” Glenn Espinosa Rails is a secret superpower

Slide 45

Slide 45 text

45 WHAT’S MISSING?

Slide 46

Slide 46 text

46 WHAT’S IN THE FUTURE?

Slide 47

Slide 47 text

47 What’s missing ➡ Comprehensive Frontend story–beyond 101 ➡ Rerformance: path to 100ms response time for every Rails app ➡ Ability to hire Ruby engineers ➡ Advocacy for SDKs, etc.

Slide 48

Slide 48 text

48 TOP-1 MISSING

Slide 49

Slide 49 text

49 AI Tooling THIS IS STILL EARLY FOR US NO, THIS IS SOOOOO LATE! ⚡ github.com/crmne/ ruby_llm ⚡ github.com/patterns-ai- core/langchainrb ⚡ Anthropic official Ruby SDK ⚡ OpenAI official Ruby SDK Both released in April 2025

Slide 50

Slide 50 text

50 Code generation for Ruby and Rails AI Tooling ➡ Is the lack of static typing going to be a slowdown? ➡ Quality/maintainability concerns: do we have enough open source code to learn from? ➡ Rails vibe coding story Spoiler: wait for the Martian talk on Wednesday! ⚡ github.com/obie/ claude-on-rails ⚡ github.com/ tidewave-ai/ tidewave_rails

Slide 51

Slide 51 text

51 MCP tooling How many of the first MCPs are built for Ruby backends? MCP is a “self-documented API” protocol that an LLM-operated system can use to interact with your app Stripe, GitHub, Gitlab, Block! ⚡ github.com/yjacquin/fast-mcp ⚡ github.com/funwarioisii/mcp-rb AI Tooling ➡ Ruby SDK to build an MCP server ➡ MCP generator from Swagger ➡ MCP proxy

Slide 52

Slide 52 text

52 Integration with AI pipelines AI Tooling Connectivity between Rails monolith and Python services built by data engineers “AI middleware” Data engineering & Data Science Product engineering

Slide 53

Slide 53 text

53 ⚡ activeagents.ai ⚡ github.com/ fractaledmind/acidic_job ⚡ github.com/ kieranklaassen/leva AI Tooling ➡ Abstractions (What Is An Agent in MVC?) ➡ Infrastructure: long-running, durable, resumable, testable, performant work fl ows with state/memory ➡ Observability as central part of product engineering (Langfuse) ➡ Quality evaluation (evals) ➡ Browser agents Agent tooling

Slide 54

Slide 54 text

54 Ruby&AI Books ⚡ rubyai.beehiiv.com

Slide 55

Slide 55 text

55 ⚡ rubyevents.org Last 12 months Ruby conferences: 35 Ruby meetups: 800 Ruby community is on 🔥 today

Slide 56

Slide 56 text

56 Visibility of Technology PAST FUTURE ✨ Tons of fun Up to us💪 Never Been Better PRESENT

Slide 57

Slide 57 text

57 “RAILS HAS NEVER BEEN BETTER FOR STARTUPS THAN TODAY!” Irina Nazarova

Slide 58

Slide 58 text

58 Join… ➡ When: November 19 - 20 ➡ CFP is open till July 13 ➡ Early bird tickets are sold out ➡ Supporter tickets are on sale ➡ General Admission opens on July 21 sfruby.com

Slide 59

Slide 59 text

No content

Slide 60

Slide 60 text

Thank you! ➡ lu.ma/sfruby Jul 19 Hackathon, Jul 22 Meetup at Figma! ➡ sfruby.com ➡ evilmartians.com ➡ anycable.io ➡ [email protected] ➡ @inazarova ➡ inazarova.bsky.social