Meet The $9 Billion AI Company Reimagining Vibe Coding

Amjad Masad’s Replit allows users to build apps together like they’re doodling on a white board. It also made the Jordanian immigrant a billionaire along the way.

Two years ago, Replit CEO Amjad Masad invited Paul Graham, the legendary cofounder of the startup incubator Y Combinator, to his home office near Palo Alto, California, to give Graham a sneak peek of Replit’s new and novel product: an AI agent that could write its own code. It was the first time Graham had seen what would become known as vibe coding. “The name hadn’t even been invented,” Graham recalls.

As the agent got to work building apps, Graham, a lifelong computer programmer, instinctively looked at the code. Masad scolded him, saying there was no need, arguing that the source code would only be an unimportant byproduct, and programming would now be done in English — a radical change for software engineers. “It was mind-bending,” Graham, one of Replit’s earliest investors, tells Forbes. “He’s bald with that beard, and I think he was actually wearing a black turtleneck. I felt like he was a Bond villain: ‘Hahaha! Don’t look at that code!’”

Now vibe coding, of course, is everywhere, and Replit is looking to take it a step further. On Wednesday, the startup announced its new agent, simply called Agent 4, which aims to deliver a new type of interface for vibe coding. Like last time, Masad demoed the new agent to Graham at his home office in early March. After the meeting, Graham gushed about the product on X. “Amjad showed me Replit's latest stuff,” he posted. “They're about to redefine vibe coding in a way that will seem obvious in retrospect. A lot of the biggest ideas have that quality.”

Instead of just typing in prompts to instruct the agent on what to code, Replit offers what it calls a digital canvas, where users can tweak mockups and app designs, doodle drawings of new features, and collaborate with other developers in real time. “It’s about designing together with the agent,” says Masad, with the goal of replicating the experience of brainstorming and building in real life. “When I walk around the office, when I see designers working with engineers, they're on the whiteboard, they're drawing, they're doing that sort of stuff.”

The takeaway, Graham tells Forbes now: “He keeps taking me around the back of his house and showing me the future.”

To jumpstart that quest for the future, Replit — which wouldn’t comment on revenues except to say it’s on track to hit annual recurring revenue of $1 billion by the end of the year — on Wednesday announced a new fundraising round of $400 million, led by VC firm Georgian, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Donald Trump Jr’s 1789, celebrities Shaquille O’Neal and Jared Leto, and sovereign wealth funds including Qatar’s QIA. The new funds will go mostly toward international expansion, especially in Asia and the Middle East, and to growing the company’s go-to-market team.

The round vaults Replit’s valuation to $9 billion, up from $3 billion just six months ago. The new influx of cash also makes Masad a billionaire for the first time, worth $2 billion, according to Forbes estimates. “They are showing the industry the art of the possible,” says VC Margaret Wu, who led the investment at Georgian. “With each new release, they get closer to this idea of a one-shot software engineering team.”

Masad, the son of a civil engineer and stay-at-home mom, grew up far from Silicon Valley, in Amman, Jordan. His parents were both refugees (his father from Palestine and his mother from Algeria) and he grew up in a lower middle class family. In 1993, when he was six, his father brought home an IBM PC, and a year later he had learned to code, building apps to teach math to his younger brother. As a child attending an international private school with kids wealthier than him, he realized early on that tech could help him economically. “A lot of my friends had Playstations and Xboxes, and I wanted those things,” Masad said. So he started developing software for local internet cafes — all-in-one management systems where customers could create accounts and protect themselves from viruses. Meanwhile, his mom instilled in him a love of art and literature. As a teen, he performed a type of competitive poetry popular in Arabic culture, similar to slam poetry in the U.S. (He doesn’t perform anymore, but said it helped him with public speaking and improvisational skills.)

After attending Jordan’s Princess Sumaya University for Technology, he moved to the US in 2012 to join Codeacademy, the startup that teaches people how to code through online courses. Then after an almost three-year stint as an engineer at Facebook, he struck out on his own to found Replit with his wife Haya, now the company’s head of design. The first iteration for the product was a browser-based code editor. One of the company’s big breaks came after Graham discovered the project one day in 2017 while browsing Hacker News, the online forum run by Y Combinator. Graham says he invested in the startup then suggested it enroll in YC. Then he emailed Sam Altman, then-president of the incubator, to try to get it into the program’s Winter 2018 batch. “I gave Amjad a really gold-plated recommendation,” Graham says. “I've been looking for this idea for years. And here it is.”

These days Replit’s biggest problem is a fearsome Goliath in the way: Claude Code, the generative coding product by AI giant Anthropic. Over the last few months, Claude Code — already considered the vibe coding frontrunner — has further run away from the pack. In early February, $380 billion-valued Anthropic released its latest model Opus 4.6, and it was so impressive that it rattled global software stocks, wiping out billions of dollars of value as investors worried these firms might face an existential threat. Meanwhile, Claude Code’s annualized revenue surged to $2.5 billion. (Claude Code’s interface is more technical and doesn’t currently have a whiteboard design element, but a version of the tool called Claude Cowork, more focused on tasks for teams across an enterprise, has a more user-friendly interface.)

Not to mention the slew of vibe coding competitors outside of Anthropic: Startups including Cognition and Lovable have been jockeying for position as well. OpenAI’s rival Codex product has 1.6 million weekly active users. Cursor, long a darling of the space, saw its annualized revenue grow to more than $2 billion over the last three months, according to a source familiar with the company’s finances, and the company has been in “war time” to fend off threats like Anthropic.

Replit hopes to stand out from the competition by being the coding agent for non-technical workers, like sales staff, marketers and small business owners. Instead of working inside a code editor, the company wants to make building apps and software more like graphic design. With Agent 4, users can start by choosing from a series of buttons to tell the agent what they want to create, including spreadsheets, data visualizations, 3D games, and more. The idea is to provide the easiest user interface to navigate, from brainstorming and iterating to deploying the app.

Masad insists Replit’s advantage over Anthropic is its nimbleness and focus as a smaller company. Anthropic’s prowess in coding is undeniable, but it’s also a giant AI lab with broader aspirations, including the ultimate goal of AGI, or artificial general intelligence, tech-speak for when machines match or surpass human capabilities, he adds. “Dario really cares about biology and curing cancer, and that's amazing,” Masad says, referring to Anthropic cofounder Dario Amodei. “We can't cure cancer. Replit is about making everyone a software engineer…I just know our limits.”

Now customers including Zillow, Databricks, PayPal and Adobe use it to build internal apps for their teams. Zillow has roughly 600 Replit seats for its employees, who have made more than 7,000 apps using the tool over the past year. Replit’s big advantage is allowing non-engineers to prototype and deploy their ideas quickly, said Lloyd Frink, cofounder and president of Zillow. “You kind of have to understand what's going on underneath the hood to make use of” other tools like Claude Code and Cursor. Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi agrees. “The majority of employees at Databricks actually aren’t programmers that are extremely technical. So Replit is perfect for that whole segment.”

Talkdesk, a $10 billion-valued AI customer service company, uses it across several teams, including sales and HR. For example, the company tapped Replit to create an app to test headcount capacity, so the company would know how many roles they could hire on. The process to build the app would have normally taken about two weeks, but instead took two days with Replit, says Shauna Geraghty, SVP and head of global talent.

While it has recently traveled an upward trajectory, the startup’s darkest point came right before the company launched its first coding agent in 2024. Masad realized the startup couldn’t go on as a coding editor where people manually wrote code. Instead, it had to fully embrace AI. The company had laid off 30 people, which triggered a broader exodus. By the end of it, only half the staff remained. How did the company get through it? “I’m willing to throw away code, throw away work, and restart from scratch,” says Masad. “I don't get sentimental.” Which is probably a good thing for a Bond villain.

About Replit

Replit is the agentic software creation platform that enables anyone to build applications using natural language. With millions of users worldwide and over 500,000 professional users, Replit is democratizing software development by removing traditional barriers to application creation. The company is headquartered in San Francisco.

→ Contact: [email protected]