Replit: The Billion Dollar Startup bringing software creation to everyone

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Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead. 

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email: 

• This startup is making software development accessible for 30M+ developers worldwide

• They just released an AI copilot to enhance your development experience

• They’ve raised a $107.4M Series D led by a16z’s Growth Fund at a $1.16B valuation

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of Replit 📈

Replit was officially founded by Amjad Masad, Haya Odeh and Faris Masad in 2016 with the mission to make software development accessible to anyone in the world. 🚀 

Replit was created to make coding super easy and fun for everyone! 

Instead of having to set up a bunch of tools on your computer, you can just go to Replit, pick your favorite coding language, and start building things right in your web browser. 🖥️

Replit has two main goals:

1. Collaborating: It helps people code together in real-time, no matter where they are in the world.

2. Simplicity: Replit makes coding simpler by supporting more than 50 programming languages, so you can easily switch between projects.

Replit even lets you build websites, apps, and other cool projects without needing to worry about installing or setting up anything. You can also share your code with friends and work on the same code together at the same time. 🛠️

More recently, Replit came out with their own AI copilot - Replit AI, which helps you build anything you want even if you don’t know how to write a single line of code! 👨‍💻 

It’s essentially this suite of AI tools that help you complete, generate, edit and explain code with natural language (as if you were talking to a human). 🤖

Backstory 👀

Amjad Masad grew up in Amman, Jordan where his father worked in the government so never made much money - but he prioritized his kids’ education so took them to a nicer school. 🏫 

Amjad had always been a rebellious kid, getting into trouble at school since he was 6 years old.

He’d do things like run away from school or incite his whole class to do something strange to bother teachers, but he always knew he’d be successful.

He had a lot of early successes including his first ever venture - selling toys. 🧸 Amjad and his brother found an arbitrage opportunity where the toys in the not so great part of town were much cheaper than the nicer part, and sold them to people at school.

His first interaction with a computer was also at 6 years old, when his dad took out a loan to buy an IBM computer for work. 🖥️ 

Amjad was only able to use it every time his father would leave the room. He was fascinated by it…

He started going to internet cafes (which were super popular in Jordan) to have more internet time, playing games all day and obsessing over Counterstrike. 🎮

By the age of 13, Amjad came up with his first software business idea 💡: Writing software that would make computers in these internet cafes more secure.

He had this problem where he had to walk a few miles to the nearest internet cafe, pay money to get 15 minutes of computer time to look up pieces of code he was stuck on, then walk back home and finish coding. 

Amjad pitched the idea to the internet cafe store owner and worked on the software for about 2 years, before actually implementing it. The software was a huge hit and made Amjad a lot of money as a teen. 💸 

Fast forward to College, Amjad had a feeling that software was going away so studied computer hardware instead. He already had this idea that AI was going to make software for you eventually. The year was 2006… 😳

Up to this point, Amjad still had some rebelliousness in him and didn’t bother attending every class. In Jordan, attendance was a big thing and you could fail a class for not showing up enough.

The youngster hacked into the university database and changed his grades so it meant he would pass classes and actually be able to graduate. 👨‍🎓 But he got caught…

Amjad ended up coming clean, and told them he did it, so the University actually offered him a cybersecurity job to make their systems less hackable.

The idea for Replit 💭 

After the cybersecurity job, Amjad went back to being interested in programming languages and was trying to learn as many languages as he could. 👾

This is when he started reading Paul Graham’s essays and Hacker News. 🗞️ He got into super niche languages like Lisp along with a lot of older ones.

While trying out different languages he found out it was a lot of work to download software for different languages and it took up a lot of space. He wanted a playground where he could just experiment with any language, but there weren’t any available online.

This was at the same time Google Docs came out - a whole editor built into the web where multiple people can edit the same document at the same time. 💃

This is when he came up with the idea for Replit 💡  - a cloud-based coding environment where you could experiment with different languages, collaborate and access your code from anywhere.

The use case for this suddenly became so obvious and the idea turned into a multi-year project.

His first prototype literally took him one weekend. It was a text box and a button that said “Run Javascript”.

Amjad started adding different languages that were on the rise like Python even though everyone at the time was betting on Java.

He eventually put Replit up on Hacker News and went semi-viral on the internet. 💫 The inventor of Java even tweeted about Replit!

Amjad wanted to build a company around Replit but it was ridiculously hard to find funding since the entrepreneurship infrastructure wasn’t really present in Jordan at the time.

He ended up joining Yahoo after graduating as a software engineer and continued Replit as a side project.

After Yahoo, he got offered a job at Codeacademy, who got him a visa to work in New York. The codeacademy founders had just graduated Y Combinator so Amjad was a founding engineer. 👨‍💻

Amjad then joined Facebook in San Francisco and worked there for about 5 years, 📲 where he did a lot of open-source work and continually worked on Replit on the side.

Replit had over 100k monthly active users and started to get more momentum. Keep in mind, it was still a side project at this point…

During this time Amjad had applied to YC 3 times and got rejected all 3 times. 😔

This is also when Paul Graham (Founder of YC) saw Replit on Hacker News and really liked the idea. Amjad got Paul’s email and they ended up trading emails back and forth for a long time. Their emails ended up being the philosophical foundation for Replit…

By the winter of 2018, Amjad finally got into YC and started growing like crazy. 📈

Python started taking off and it was clear that it would be the next big thing. Replit was the only cloud-based coding environment that supported Python…

Fast forward to today, Python is super widely used, being the language of choice for things like machine learning and backend development.

Stats 📊

In 2018, Replit hit over 1M users, still only as a team of 4, and raised a $4.5M seed round led by a16z.

Fast forward to today, Replit has over 30M users from over 200 countries.

30M users is a lot when those users are programmers. Imagine how many users Replit's users have… 🤯

235M projects have been created using Replit, creating 25B external monthly visits to apps and sites hosted on Replit.

Replit has even recently partnered with Google where Replit developers get access to Google Cloud services, infrastructure, and foundation models, further reducing the time from idea to live software on Replit.

The startup now also has a huge AI tailwind with the release of their copilot and tens of millions of developers that could be using it.

In 2023, Replit raised a $107.4M Series D at a $1.16B post-money valuation led by a16z’s growth fund with participation from Khosla Ventures, Coatue, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Bloomberg Beta, Naval Ravikant, Hamilton Helmer, ARK Venture Fund and Craft Ventures.

This brings their total funding raised to $272M.

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