GitHub Copilot competitor Replit raises $100 million in funding as investors bet big on generative AI

The sudden success of OpenAI ChatGPT has led to a surge in the flow of investment into generative artificial intelligence (AI) as investors pour billions of dollars into promising AI startups. The latest is Replit, a San Francisco-based generative AI startup that is starting a browser-based coding revolution with its collaborative integrated development environment (IDE).

Back in February, we wrote about Replit after it launched its web-based IDE, a ChatGPT-like bot for coders similar to the GitHub Copilot competitor. Replit got its name from Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL), an interactive programming environment where user inputs are read and evaluated, and then the results are returned to the user. Immediately after the launch, Replit quickly caught the attention of prominent investors in Silicon Valley.

Fast forward two months later, Replit announced this week it has raised about $100 million ($97.4 million) at a $1.16 billion post-money valuation, making the company a new member of our unicorn startup club. The Series B extension round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Coatue, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Bloomberg Beta, Naval Ravikant, ARK Ventures, and Hamilton Helmer.

“We are relentless in our mission to empower a billion software developers,” Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad said in a statement, adding that the new funds — which bring Replit’s total raised to over $200 million — will be put toward further developing the core product experience, expanding Replit’s cloud services and “driving innovation” in AI.

“AI has already brought that future closer,” Masad continued. “We look forward to expanding our offerings for professional developers.”

Replit is aiming to do coding what Figma did to the design world by using AI to write code via a browser. The startup recently launched Ghostwriter Chat, the first-of-its-kind technology.

Replit startup has trained an AI bot, like ChatGPT, which can assist in writing computer code through conversational interaction. Starting Wednesday, Replit said software developers will now have access to powerful new technology, Semafor reported.

The company stats is also mind-blowing. In just a short time, Replit has 22.5 million developers from 200+ countries with 235 million projects created. 25 billion monthly external visits to apps and sites hosted on Replit plus 1 million containers running concurrently
3 million/second of sustained read/write disk operations. Replit also has 200,000 AI applications leveraging every major generative AI API.

Founded in 2016 by CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad, Replit is like Google Docs for developers. It enables developers to write and collaborate on software in real time. The startup also offers a “bounty” service in which companies and individuals can ask the Replit community to create specific codes for a fee.

In an exclusive interview with Semafor, Masad said: “Coding turned out to be almost the perfect use case for LLMs,” referring to the “large language models” that power technology such as ChatGPT. With Replit, developers can build software collaboratively from anywhere in the world, on any device, without spending a second on setup, the company said on its website.

Masad believes the software will give the most skilled developer the ability to create “one-person billion-dollar companies” by exponentially increasing their ability to build complex software programs, including new artificial intelligence-enabled businesses.