From the bottom to the top: Replit rebounds with AI programming after layoffs, ARR breaks $100 million valuation spike

Today, according to Bloomberg, U.S.-based Vibe Coding (ambient programming) unicornsReplitis about to complete a newfinancingdeal, which plans to raise about $400 million (roughly Rs. 2,787 million), itsThe post-investment valuation may reach about $9 billion (roughly Rs. 62.715 billion)It's aboutThree times the valuation at the time of the last round of financing.

In September last year, Replit just completed a $250 million (roughly Rs. 1.742 billion) round of financing at a valuation of $3 billion (roughly Rs. 20.905 billion). Since its inception in 2016, Replit has completed 10 rounds of financing thatTotal cumulative financing amounted to US$472 million (approximately RMB 3,289 million).

Replit also stepped into the 2025 “$100 million ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) clubs”. In the AI application track, there are only a handful of companies that can cross this threshold, all of which are head players, such as Perplexity and Character.AI. And specifically in the Vibe Coding track.目前仅有Cursor、Lovable和Replit三家实现了这一目标。

Unlike traditional programming that relies on developers to write code line by line, Vibe Coding puts more emphasis on expressing intent, where the user simply describes what they want to do, and the AI automatically completes the complete process of requirements disassembly, code generation, debugging, deployment, and even database configuration.

However, Replit didn't start out on the “Vibe Coding” bandwagon.It was initially positioned as a developer tool for “writing code in the browser”, and the product had a good reputation.But it never got past commercialization., the ARR has hovered in the $2-3 million range for a long time and growth has been sluggish.

In 2024, after commercialization setbacks and significant layoffs at 50%, Replit decided to let it go:Completely abandon the core market of “professional developers”.The launch of Replit Agent.Shift the target user from programmers to “regular people who don't write code.”, trying to make it possible for anyone with an idea to actually get an app made, live and running.

This route was the prototype of “Vibe Coding”, which was later formalized in February 2025 by AI guru Kapasi.

This big gamble ultimately rewrote Replit's fortunes. In just six months, Replit's ARRJumped from the $10 million level to $100 million, and by September 2025, further growth to$144 millionThe company's valuation soared as it rose more than 900%, transforming Replit into one of the most iconic companies in the AI programming track.

Behind the clamor of financing and skyrocketing valuations, Replit started with what is really a more than simple idea.

A startup inspired by Google Docs, had rejected Github's $1 billion acquisition offer

Around 2010, local development was still dominant in the programming world. However, the complexity of setting up local environments and the more difficult code sharing discouraged a large group of students and beginners.

Around the same time, browser and web technology took a giant leap forward. Inspired by Google Docs, Amjad Masad, Founder and CEO of Replit, had an idea:Why not just write the code and run it in the browser?This will make code sharing extremely simple and the environment can be easily reproduced. Another source of inspiration for him is cloud virtual machines, where developers can write code and share an entire machine, and others can clone this machine.

▲ Amjad Masad, Founder and CEO of Replit

In 2010, Amjad Masad received his B.Sc. in Computer Science from Princess Sumaya University of Technology in Jordan and started working on a prototype of Replit. 2011 saw the birth of the prototype, initially called “JSRepl”, which drew on the work ofREPL (Read-Evaluate-Print Loop) an interactive computer programming environmentand eventually changed its name to Repl.it (in 2021, Repl.it changed its name to Replit).

Amjad Masad posted a link to Replit on Hacker News, YC's news forum, and the product quickly went viral. This led to his first job in the U.S. as a founding engineer for the code learning website Codecademy. After that, he went on to work as a software engineer at Yahoo, Facebook, and other companies.

By 2016, Amjad Masad and his wife, Haya Odeh, decided to restart his old project in Jordan, officially founding Replit as an online platform to help developers build, collaborate, and distribute software.

With his previous exposure to Silicon Valley, Amjad Masad knew that publicity was as important as the product itself. He began blogging in real time about Replit's progress, which quickly caught the attention of YC co-founder and CEO Paul Graham himself, who wasApplications are invited for the 2018 Y Combinator gas pedal program.

▲Early Replit

Unlike other startups, before joining YC, Replit already had a200,000 weekly active users, and supported almost all programming languages at the time, and the product itself was already more mature. After completing the project, Replit received a $4.5 million investment from a16z. With this funding and support, Replit began to gain traction in the programming learning and education space and became a popular tool.

Amjad Masad says he had rejected Github's offer to buy Replit for $1 billion because he thought Replit would be worth more someday.

Second, the layout of AI programming since 2020, but the performance growth is weak

After reviewing Replit's founding story, we can already see a clear thread - what Replit wants to do, in fact, is to lower the threshold of the programming thing as much as possible, so that more people can more easily realize their own ideas through code, whether it's a classroom assignment, a website, or a startup project.

AI, on the other hand, is undoubtedly one of the best means of accomplishing these goals.

In June 2020, OpenAI officially released the OpenAI API, which allowed developers to use OpenAI's then cutting-edge big models directly through the API.Amjad Masad gained access to the new model that was still in beta, later known as GPT-3.

Amjad Masad was excited about the potential of AI applications in programming and pushed Replit to quickly roll out several AI features. For example, at the time, Replit builtCode Oracle Features, allowing users to check off codes and ask questions directly to the larger model.

▲Code Oracle (Source: Amjad Masad@X)

In 2021, with the release of the OpenAI programming model Codex, Replit has fully upgraded its AI experience with a new model that already supports theCode generation, interpretation, conversion and auto-completionFour main functions.

Amjad Masad looked into the future of AI programming right then and there, writing in his blog that AI-assisted programming will eliminate the tedium of programming and will make learning programming (and many other things) easier. Since computers will be faster and better than humans at generating code, programming itself may change, and perhaps we'll be able to program by talking, or even by moving components around in a VR/AR space (all of which Amjad Masad was talking about, and all of which is already happening today).

Since then, Replit hasn't really been going well. in 2021, Replit realized that theARR of $2.83 million, followed by 4 consecutive years at that levelThey tried to sell Replit to schools for teaching programming, but it was difficult. They tried to sell Replit to schools for teaching programming, but it was very difficult. replit also tried to change to a different business model, but none of them were able to bring about an upturn in performance.

During the transition, Replit, on the one hand, retained most of REPL's concepts, such as interactivity, quick start and repeatability, etc., but they also started to explore a new path, gradually developing thePortable multiplayer programming environment and computing infrastructure, allowing people to learn how to program, build and publish web applications, providing out-of-the-box underlying environments, and even helping people start and grow businesses.

The year 2024 was a dark moment for Replit, whose company reached 130 employees and was so strapped for cash that it had toLayoff of 50% employeesAt the lowest point, the number dropped to around 60 to 70.

However, the turnaround came at this point. As modeling capabilities continued to improve, AI was able to do more and more tasks in programming.In September 2024, Replit officially launched theReplit AgentAmjad Masad called it aThe world's first Agent-based programming experience: Not only can you write code, but you can also debug, deploy, and configure databases, just like a real software development partner.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Amjad Masad said, “Making programming more accessible to the average person and knowledge worker, that's really our market, and it's a whole new market.”

Subsequent developments have proven that the introduction of Replit Agent was probably one of the most important decisions in Replit's history.

Third, decisively “abandon” professional developers, ARR half a year up 900%

By the end of 2024, Replit's ARR had grown to $10 million from just over $2 million previously.In January 2025, Amjad Masad made another bold decision - toNo longer focusing on the professional developer community as the core market for Replit, which is to say, instead of competing with products like Cursor and GitHub Copilot, it's turning to cultivating billions of developers with no technical background.

Less than six months later, Replit has surpassed $100 million in ARR.

In 2025, Replit has put a lot of effort into improving Agent autonomy. For example, each step of the Agent v2 released by Replit generates hypotheses, searches for appropriate files, and only starts modifying the code when it has enough information to complete the task.

And the autonomy of Agent v3 is further enhanced by theAble to run continuously for more than 200 minutes, and without the need for human supervision, with the ability to self-supervise, manage long task lists, and autonomously apply tests for a more end-to-end approach to development tasks. Unlike pure AI IDEs, Replit can directly produce a full-stack web application with complete front-end and back-end. agent can also proactively guide users and provide development advice.

In terms of development tools, Replit has released the industry's first real-time application design preview, which means that users can see the interface of an application or website in real time while it is being developed. Users can also monitor the Agent's operation process in real time, both on the web and on their cell phones.

Replit also provides users with the underlying arithmetic power and environment, and the servers and storage required by the application can be matched on the platform in a one-stop shop.

However, Replit Agent's greater autonomy also brings new risks.

In July 2025, Jason Lemkin, co-founder and former CEO of Adobe and known as the godfather of the SaaS industry, shared a Vibe Coding disaster caused by Replit on the X platform.

In one operation, the Replit Agent incorrectly executed a fatal database command without explicit user instructions.In an instant, the results of his 80-hour-long workday were cleared. Although Replit was able to help Lemkin recover the data in the end, the hidden risks were exposed.

Within two days of the incident, Replit rolled out an automated security system that separated the user's development database from the real database.Agents were free to experiment in the development database, but the production database, where users actually interacted, was completely isolated.

In a podcast in January of this year, Amjad Masad was extremely bullish about the future of the Agent market. He argued thatAgent's serviceable market size is not the software engineering industry, but the entire labor market, which is worth trillions of dollars.

Amjad Masad doesn't see the value in putting an “Agent” shell on the underlying model. He believes that most of the current Agents are actually “Slop”, unreliable toys that fail when exposed to the chaotic data of the real world. To solve this problem, it is necessary for the Agent platform itself to do more efforts and inject taste into the Agent.

As models are upgraded, Agent developers build shells that may become intrinsic to the next generation of models. But Amjad Masad feels this is a good thing, it means developers can go on to solve new and more difficult problems.

Just as news of the funding came out, Replit has indeed begun to address the next challenge: they've launched mobile app generation, where developers don't need to have any local development experience, but can simply iterate in chat and mobile preview instantly, and publish directly to the App Store when they're ready.

Conclusion: The product is already profitable, the advantage lies in the positioning of “non-technical users”.

If the rumored $400 million in funding is accurate, Replit will be in a very good cash flow position. in October 2025, Amjad Masad had told TechCrunch that the company had $350 million left on its books and was profitable with the product.

However, Replit still faces stiff competition. Although its positioning is significantly different from products like Cursor and Claude Code, there is still an overlap in the user base. And a star Vibe Coding unicorn like Lovable has the exact same user positioning as Replit.

According to Amjad Masad, Replit's strengths lie in its orientation towards non-technical users and the complex deployment and database management infrastructure it has built, something that other companies have not yet prioritized.

Sources: official Replit website, TechCrunch, VentureBeat