Startups on Rails in Past, Present and Future

At RailsConf 2025, in Philadelphia, PA, United States
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In 2025 Ruby on Rails continues to power successful startups: during the last 12 months one of them became the leading AI-powered app builder, another raised $150M, and another filed for IPO. But let’s put things into perspective and explore how the essence of Rails’ appeal to founders since the beginning and into the future.

We’ll journey through Rails history with pivotal stories from Intercom, Gusto, and Y Combinator - companies that leveraged Rails’ productivity to achieve remarkable growth. These legendary examples demonstrate which aspects of Rails and its ecosystem were key for bringing products to market and sustaining explosive growth.

Then we’ll celebrate recent Rails success stories—such as Bolt.new, Whop, Chime and Uscreen—examining the tremendous success these startups have posted recently. We’ll explore the key factors behind Rails’ resurgence among founders who are choosing the framework in recent years, including Hotwire, Inertia, Kamal and more.

Finally, we’ll take these learnings and look into the future by identifying what we can all do to ensure Rails continues being the choice for tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. We’ll discuss tooling, open source, educational resources, and community voices that could catalyze even more startup success stories on Rails.

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Irina Nazarova CEO at Evil Martians

Evil Martians transform growth-stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products. Hire us to design and build your product