RubyConfTH Bangkok 2026

Startups on Rails

What I learned from 50+ founders.

Irina Nazarova

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PAGA Microroastery

Irina Nazarova

01Ruby10

死廃Legacy

Python

AITakeOver

Still???????

TypeScript

01100110

Dead???!!!

恐怖Fear

00110101

The Question

"Are you still using Ruby?"

You've heard it. At conferences. From recruiters. From that friend who switched to Rust.

Context

50+

founders interviewed

6

talks given

1

conference organized

25

Rails startups services at Evil Martians

Part One

The Fear

Our Hero

A Ruby engineer who loves Ruby.

You've built things. You've shipped products. You're productive.

Ruby feels right.

But lately...

The anxiety creeps in.

[!]

AI is "taking our jobs." Every headline says so.

[~]

Python owns machine learning. Every tutorial is Python.

[~]

JavaScript owns the web. TypeScript is "the future."

[?]

Ruby is big in Japan. But Japan is... "different"?

The real question you're asking:

"How do I secure my career and my family's future
for the next ten years?"

Learn Python? Learn ML? Drop Ruby?

The Shame

[$]

Founders don't mention Ruby to investors.

[#]

Engineers hedge: "We use Rails, but we're considering..."

[~]

Job posts avoid saying "Ruby" in the title.

How we respond to fear:

Denial

"Ruby is fine. Nothing's changing. Those people don't know what they're talking about."s

Shame

"I don't mention Ruby anymore. I say 'backend' and hope they don't ask."

Flight

"I'm learning Rust on weekends. Just in case."

Defensiveness

"Ruby has ALWAYS been underrated! You just don't understand!"

Part Two

The Mentor

Sarah Mei

SF Ruby Conference 2025

Wisdom

"Operating from a place of fear is not helpful to us as individuals, as an industry, as a society."

Sarah has been in Ruby since 2006. She founded RailsBridge. She's seen every shift.

Every major shift felt like the end.

Virtual Machines (Late 90s)

Java

"You'll never run a VM in production. You need hand-tuned memory."

Cloud (Mid 2000s)

AWS

"You need to control your own hardware. Cloud will never work for serious apps."

AI (Now)

LLMs

"You'll always need to write code yourself. AI can't replace developers."

What each shift actually did:

✓ Made development faster

✓ Enabled more ambitious projects

✓ Allowed more people to build

My Story

I joined Evil Martians in 2017.

We built incredible things in Ruby.
AnyCable. TestProf. Action Policy. Dip. Many more

But I had the same fear:
What if our effort is in vain?

Our team searched constantly
for something better.

We tried Next.js, Nuxt, Nest... Go. Rust.

We were most productive with Rails.

In 2021, I became CEO.

And I realized: if OUR team — some of the best Rails engineers in the world — can't find anything better...

It means something.

Part Three

The Evidence

Let's look at what's actually happening.

Shoutout to companies in Southeast Asia

Building, succeeding and hiring Ruby developers right now

🇹🇭

Opn

Fintech unicorn

🇮🇩

Mekari

Indonesia's #1 SaaS

🇲🇾

CoinGecko

Crypto data platform

🇸🇬

Crypto.com

150M+ users exchange

🇹🇭

Nimble

Rails dev agency

🇲🇾

Mindvalley

Ed-tech platform

🇸🇬

Grain

Catering & food tech

🇸🇬

Quincus

Logistics SaaS

🇸🇬

Emeritus

Online education

🇸🇬

Funding Societies

SME lending platform

SF Ruby Conference 2025

25

Startups demoed

12

AI-native companies

5

YC-backed

3

Unicorns

25 founders who demoed at SF Ruby

Alex

Wyatt

Auston

David

Matt

Zach

Brian

Avinash

James

André

Kieran

Brad

Arjun

Nagendra

Peter

Ryan

Dan

Carmine

Bart

Andy

Chamod

Sam

Kody

Ryan

Evgeny

Real founders. Real products. All Ruby.

These aren't legacy companies
hanging on.

They're startups that chose Ruby
in 2023, 2024, 2025.

Case Study

Bolt.new

Build and deploy full-stack web apps with AI

Founded 2017 · $135M raised · $700M valuation

$40M ARR in 8 weeks

"It's an overnight success seven years in the making... Rails was what caught my attention because it was just so easy to get started with. The ability to go to market fast has been a really key advantage."

Albert Pai, CTO

Case Study

Cora Computer

AI email agent that triages and replies for you

Founded 2024 · Featured in New Yorker.

"I enabled it for my own account... The day after, it feels cleaner. We still had that urge to check and refresh, but there was nothing. It was just cleaner. It was quiet."

Kieran Klaassen, solo founder

"I'm having a lot of fun. More fun than I've ever had building software."

Case Study

Chatwithwork

Search and draft across all your work apps

"Chat with Work evolved far beyond just search. It's become more like Claude Code for your workplace. With Rails, RubyLLM, and the Async stack, we can build things that would require entire teams in other ecosystems."

Carmine Paolino, creator of RubyLLM

Rails 8 + RubyLLM

Gmail, Drive, Docs context

54 sec to working AI chat

Case Study

AI support agent by Intercom

$1.275B valuation · 1M+ tickets resolved/week

Did they rewrite in Python?

No.

• 2M-line Rails monolith: still the core

• Python only for: GPU workloads, model training

• Business logic, data, integrations: Rails

Eugene Kenny

Intercom

Resilience

"2.5 million lines of Ruby code... 250+ engineers... In the age of LLMs, it's resilient."

14 years on Rails. Still growing. Still shipping.

And 8 more AI-native startups on Ruby

Simple AI

Enterprise voice agents

Sixfold

AI insurance underwriting

Cactus

AI lead qualification 24/7

Superconductor

Parallel coding agents

Bemi AI

AI customer support agents

Cleary

AI HR platform

LlamaPress

AI content platform on Rails

CorePilot

AI-powered ERP for aviation

12 total. The "Python owns AI" narrative doesn't match reality.

What I did not expect...

Founders ARE building the ecosystem

RubyLLM

Carmine Paolino

3,452★

Terminalwire

Brad Gessler

+ Superform

compound-engineering

Kieran Klaassen

6,240★

Building startups AND the tools we all need.

Part Four

What Needs Work

Real gaps exist. Let's face them.

Brian Moseley

CTO, Sixfold · $21.5M raised

"The agent's box is written in Python today.
Not proud of that fact."

Missing in Ruby:

Agent orchestration Built-in tracing Agent-to-agent protocols

Evgeny Li

Founder, Bemi AI

"Gradual typing in Ruby is a mess —
fragmented between RBS, Steep, Sorbet."

"Types are not just for safety. They're a source of information for AI tools."

— Vladimir Dementyev, Rails X keynote

Albert Pai

CTO, Bolt.new · $700M valuation

"I would love strong support for serverless —
running Rails on Lambda or Cloudflare Workers."

What they don't complain about:

"Ruby is too slow"

Not a single founder mentioned performance as a blocker

"ActiveRecord doesn't scale"

Intercom: 2M req/sec. AngelList: $100B managed.

"Can't hire Ruby developers"

Smaller pool = more experienced engineers. Plus: developers switching from JavaScript.

"We need to rewrite"

Zero migration plans. Zero.

"Ruby is slow"

This narrative is from 2014.

It's now 2026.

3x

Ruby 3 vs Ruby 2

Better memory, GC, M:N threads

+15%

YJIT by Shopify

JIT compiler, enable with one flag

Sources: ruby-lang.org · speed.yjit.org

Ruby YJIT vs Python

bddicken/languages · M3 MacBook Pro · 2025

Loops (1B iterations) 2.9x faster

11.0s

31.6s

Levenshtein distance 1.9x faster

419ms

799ms

N-body simulation 2.8x faster

1.04s

2.97s

Ruby YJIT is ~2x faster than Python

Ruby YJIT 3.4 CPython 3.13

Source: benjdd.com/languages

Micro Frameworks

TechEmpower Round 23 · Fortunes test · Feb 2025

Express (Node.js) 173K req/s

Roda (Ruby) 166K req/s

Nest.js (TypeScript) 161K req/s

FastAPI (Python) 109K req/s

Roda is 96% of Express speed

Source: techempower.com/benchmarks · Best config per framework

Full-Stack Frameworks

TechEmpower Round 23 · Fortunes test · Feb 2025

Laravel Workerman 50K req/s

Rails Iodine 48K req/s

Rails Puma (default) 43K req/s

Rails Falcon 41K req/s

Django Meinheld 33K req/s

Laravel FPM (default) 16K req/s

Even default Rails beats optimized Django

Source: techempower.com/benchmarks · Best config per framework

Let go of purism

Ruby for business logic and getting to product-market fit.
We add other languages for specialized tools as we grow.

Go / Rust / C++

Fast infrastructure and tools

Python

Model training, data pipelines

Ruby / Rails

Business logic

React, Vue, Svelte

Frontend with Inertia Rails

Source: evilmartians.com

What the surveys say

Pragmatic Engineer · 3,000 senior engineers · 2025

#5 most used language

#3 most loved language

"Surprised to see so many Ruby devs, not that far from Java"

Stack Overflow · 65,000 developers · 2025

6.4% Ruby ↑ from 5.2%

5.9% Rails ↑ from 4.7%

Reversing years of decline

Ruby is popular among senior engineers from well-funded products.

Ruby and Rails success stories

SF Ruby version

Part Five

The Insight

Ruby's strengths are
more valuable in the AI era.

Not less. More.

Ruby is token-efficient.

15-25%

fewer tokens than Python

40-60%

fewer tokens than Go/Java

Source: Martin Alderson's GPT-4 tokenizer analysis — martinalderson.com

Convention over configuration
powers AI.

Conventions are context engineering

60K+ repos now have AGENTS.md files telling AI about project structure. Rails conventions already encode all of that.

20 years of training data

All Rails apps follow the same patterns. Tighter prior distribution = more correct output.

The framework is the prompt

No CLAUDE.md needed to explain where models, controllers, and tests go. The AI already knows.

What's here. What's missing.

Already here

YJIT — 10-15% faster, on by default
AnyCable — 10x faster streaming, Durable Streams
async gem + Fibers — high-concurrency I/O
Falcon — 6K req/s on 60MB RAM
RubyLLM, langchainrb — multi-provider AI
Official SDKs — Anthropic & OpenAI
Solid Queue — 20M jobs/day at 37signals

Needs integration

Sorbet / RBS — Shopify: 99% of 75K files typed. Needs to be default for AI code verification
Async in Rails — Fibers work, need first-class framework support
Ractors — true parallelism maturing (Port API in Ruby 3.5)
Active Agent — MVC conventions for AI, still early

Genuinely missing

Native ML — still call Python for model training
Training data share — smaller Ruby corpus in LLMs
Event-driven orchestration — multi-agent workflows beyond request/response

Part Six

The Choice

Choosing Ruby is not the easy path anymore.

It's not "free money."

It's not the default.

Python gets the SDKs first. JavaScript gets the hype.

Anthropic ships Python and TypeScript SDKs before launch.

Ruby? Nothing. For two years.

So Alex Rudall builds the anthropic gem himself.

"Thank you @alexrudall for donating the anthropic Ruby gem name and paving the way by building the first Anthropic Ruby SDK."

— Anthropic's official SDK README, April 2025

In other ecosystems, you wait.
In Ruby, you build — and the giants come to you.

The real choice:

Bigger ecosystem

Wait for official SDKs.
Follow the giants.
Ecosystems too big to shape.

Stay comfortable

Ruby community

Small enough to influence.
Big enough to matter.
Your contribution counts.

Choose Ruby

Part Seven

The Return

I found my mission.

Help people see that Rails is best.

And more importantly — it's OURS.

Not 37signals. Not Shopify.
The people in this room. YOU.

Vladimir Dementyev

Rails X keynote, SF Ruby Conference

"Rails is not a single perfect idea. It's a messy quilt that we are constructing together."

What Ruby needs from you:

$ Mention Ruby in press releases and blog posts

$ Request missing SDKs from vendors

$ Name Ruby/Rails in job post titles

$ Try new open source and collaborate with authors

$ Contribute and collaborate on open source

$ Promote the constructive vision of the future of Ruby

$ Run and support local meetups and groups

$ Celebrate Ruby success stories

$ Bring people into community

The question isn't
"Will Ruby survive?"

It's: "What will you build?"

If you want to follow the crowd — Python is right there.
If you want to build the future — welcome to Ruby.

Thank you!

Irina Nazarova

Evil Martians • SF Ruby

sfruby.com/rubyconfth

Startups on Rails

Irina Nazarova

"Are you still using Ruby?"

The Fear

A Ruby engineer who loves Ruby.

The anxiety creeps in.

The real question you're asking:

The Shame

How we respond to fear:

Denial

Shame

Flight

Defensiveness

The Mentor

Sarah Mei

Every major shift felt like the end.

Virtual Machines (Late 90s)

Cloud (Mid 2000s)

AI (Now)

What each shift actually did:

I joined Evil Martians in 2017.

Our team searched constantlyfor something better.

We were most productive with Rails.

In 2021, I became CEO.

The Evidence

Shoutout to companies in Southeast Asia

SF Ruby Conference 2025

25 founders who demoed at SF Ruby

These aren't legacy companies hanging on.

Bolt.new

Cora Computer

Chatwithwork

Did they rewrite in Python?

Eugene Kenny

And 8 more AI-native startups on Ruby

Simple AI

Sixfold

Cactus

Superconductor

Bemi AI

Cleary

LlamaPress

CorePilot

Founders ARE building the ecosystem

RubyLLM

Terminalwire

compound-engineering

What Needs Work

Brian Moseley

Evgeny Li

Albert Pai

What they don't complain about:

"Ruby is slow"

Ruby YJIT vs Python

Micro Frameworks

Full-Stack Frameworks

Let go of purism

Go / Rust / C++

Python

Ruby / Rails

React, Vue, Svelte

What the surveys say

Ruby and Rails success stories

The Insight

Ruby's strengths are more valuable in the AI era.

Ruby is token-efficient.

Convention over configuration powers AI.

Conventions are context engineering

20 years of training data

The framework is the prompt

What's here. What's missing.

Already here

Needs integration

Genuinely missing

The Choice

Choosing Ruby is not the easy path anymore.

Anthropic ships Python and TypeScript SDKs before launch.

Ruby? Nothing. For two years.

So Alex Rudall builds the anthropic gem himself.

The real choice:

Our team searched constantly
for something better.

These aren't legacy companies
hanging on.

Ruby's strengths are
more valuable in the AI era.

Convention over configuration
powers AI.

The question isn't
"Will Ruby survive?"