databases
(3)
The Cloud With an Exit Door
Appwrite began as a backend its founder could not afford to host. Seven years later, that constraint has become the pitch: take the convenient cloud today, keep the right to leave tomorrow.
Notion
Notion is an all-in-one connected workspace that blends notes, docs, wikis, databases, projects, calendar, and email into a single, modular tool - 'LEGO for software.' Founded in San Francisco in 2013 by Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, it nearly collapsed before its 2016 rebirth and has since grown to more than 100 million users, $600M+ in annual recurring revenue, and an $11 billion valuation, increasingly positioning itself as an AI workspace with built-in agents.
Railway
Railway is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and cloud infrastructure company founded in 2020 by Jake Cooper, positioning itself as 'the developer cloud for the AI era.' It lets developers deploy apps and databases instantly with zero configuration — no DevOps, no FinOps, no SecOps required. Starting from zero marketing spend, Railway grew to over 2.68 million developers and penetrated 31% of Fortune 500 companies purely through word-of-mouth. In January 2026 it raised a $100M Series B to challenge AWS and the legacy cloud giants, underpinned by its own proprietary Railway Metal bare-metal data centers.