StackBlitz (Bolt.new): 0 to $20M ARR in 2 months. The fastest growing startup ever?? 🦄

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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 potentially the fastest to hit unicorn status ever 🦄 

• They’ve already gotten to $20M in ARR only 2 months from launch 📈 

• They’re in talks to raise an $83.5 Million Series B at a $700M valuation led by Emergence Capital and GV 💰️ 

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

StackBlitz was founded in 2017 by Eric Simons and Albert Pai with the vision to help everyone on planet earth to build incredible apps from Fortune 100 to 10 year-olds. 👶

Bolt.new is a product by Stackblitz that’s similar to ChatGPT or Claude, but used to build web applications. 💻

You can prompt anything from building a landing page or blog, to a full-stack web app with full authentication, logins and payment.

It can be used a lot more effectively to build something instead of going to a dev agency or shop. 

You can literally put in your idea, hit enter and get a real production website in seconds. 💨

If you look at the world right now, there’s 25 million developers globally. 🧑‍💻 According to Eric, we’re on this growth clip where there should be 100 million “software composers” with this AI boom. 🤖

Unique Value Proposition 💎

StackBlitz makes all of this possible with their own tech: Web containers. 🪢

If you want to run dev environments, you need to be able to install arbitrary packages and run different tool chains. ⚒️

A web container is essentially web assembly and an Operating System that can run right in your browser.

StackBlitz’s biggest advantage? They’ve been building this tech for the past 5 years - turns out it’s pretty difficult stuff to do. 😤

Bolt.new is also completely open-source. Eric says that it was inevitable someone would get an AI model to do the same thing, so it made sense to have anyone be able to work on improving the code.

The 2 founders also came from a web development background, so knew that staying open-source would just accelerate iterative deployment and innovation in the space. ⏩

In other words, open-source lets people fork it, improve it and contribute to it. It also helps Bolt grow through community. 👑

What’s interesting is that power users of Bolt actually know more about how to use the product than the founders. 🤯

Backstory 👀

Growing up Eric and Albert were best friends and lived down the road from each other in Chicago. 🧒

They learned to code together from the age of 13 and started building web applications together.

Coding was a necessary part of bringing these things to life according to Eric. 💁

Before StackBlitz, the 2 co-founders founded Thinkster in 2013 to educate people on web development, building real apps from scratch using the latest frameworks.

This included using languages like Django, Angular, React and Typescript to build and launch full-stack web apps. They ended up exiting the startup in 2018. 💰

By then, they started StackBlitz to make building an entire web app accessible to absolutely everybody.

They realised that browsers had hit an inflection point where the browser had gotten really powerful. 💥You could now run a whole OS in a browser…

This was super cool because you could use the web to build the web which was an important capability of every single successful platform. 

For example, Windows can build Windows apps, MacOS can build Mac apps. 🖥️ This seemed like a super valuable problem to solve.

The web container technology took 4 entire years to build before launch. 🦥The founders got it to work in May 2021, but for years struggled to build a product that drove mass adoption.

The StackBlitz team tried building the idea for bolt in January 2024 with some of the state-of-the-art models, but they weren't good enough to actually do code generation. 🧑‍💻

At this point they were on the brink of running out of cash completely… 😢

As soon as they saw code gen capabilities from models like GPT-4o and the newest versions of Claude they decided to launch bolt.new.

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Traction 🚀

They launched in October and within one week of launch, bolt.new had double the amount of traffic of StackBlitz. 📈StackBlitz has been online for 7 years…

StackBlitz built through community and grew through it. Investing in their community meant they didn’t see much churn either.

It was critical to be building a community, especially with an AI product where they’d otherwise have high churn rates of up to 70%. 

Bolt.new got a ton of traction through word of mouth. The product was a sensation in the entrepreneurial, Saas, indie hacker and dev circles. ⛳

People in these spaces started promoting bolt.new genuinely as a way to build full-stack web apps in the easiest way possible.

The StackBlitz team also had an incredible amount of iteration and improvement to the product, agent and underlying models.

They saw huge increases in conversion rates from these improvements, most notably the Claude Sonnet update. 🤖

Anthropic even partnered with StackBlitz and wrote a whole case study about them.

Stats 📊

4 weeks in, the product was doing $4M in ARR, and adding half a million in ARR per day… 💸

It’s now faster to make a working prototype with code than design it in Figma. Product Managers can now write code directly.

Today, 3 million developers use StackBlitz every month. They now attract almost 1 million new users every month… 💫

Bolt.new was reported to have hit $20M in ARR in December 2024. At current growth rates, my guess is it’s probably at $30-40M in ARR right now.

StackBlitz now has a 20-person team and plans to expand with their newest raise.

They’re now in talks to raise an $83.5 Million Series B at a $700M valuation led by Emergence Capital and GV with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Conviction and Mantis bringing their total raised to $113.4M.

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