A generative AI coding platform for developers has doubled its funding in a Series B extension that pushed the San Francisco startup's valuation past $1 billion.
Replit announced on Tuesday that it raised $94.7 million in a round that was led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors that participated include Khosla Ventures, Coatue, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Bloomberg Beta, Naval Ravikant and ARK Ventures.
The round also included investors who had previously committed capital with a simple agreement for future equity, or SAFE note, including those who collectively contributed more than $5 million through a Wefunder crowdfunding campaign that closed in May 2022.
Replit had previously raised just over $100 million, bringing its total funding to more than $200 million. And its valuation jumped to around $1.2 billion, the Replit said in the announcement, up from $800 million in 2021.
“We’re ready to become a place where people can host production-ready, mission-critical applications and to power entire teams,” co-founder and CEO Amjad Masad told Semafor, which first reported the news.
Last month, Replit also announced a partnership with Google, Bloomberg News reported, in which Replit would expand its use of Google's cloud services and get access to the tech giant's generative AI tools to improve its coding tools, automation and chat bot. It also puts the startup in front of more potential customers.
The partnership with Replit also positions Google to further its competitive goals against rival Microsoft, which owns the developer platform GitHub and signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI.
In January, GitHub announced that it had surpassed 100 million developers on its platform.
Replit said it has more than 22 million developers using its platform. It also has more than 80 employees and will continue to expand the team.
Masad co-founded Replit in 2016 with Haya Odeh as a platform to help developers save time while writing code. They used OpenAI's early GPT software to initially train Replit's system and have since used other open-source models and developed its own system.
Earlier in April, Masad told Bay Area Inno that while applying generative AI technology to coding could threaten middle stack developer jobs, the company's mission is accelerating development for front-end engineers.
“I think in the long term, this technology is going to change the world," Masad told Bay Area Inno in a previous interview, but advanced AI models are not going to bring about a robot revolution anytime soon. “I worry that we’re entering an overhyped phase of this technology.”
That hype, which we examined more in-depth earlier this month, has brought a funding boom to generative AI startups, despite a broader downturn that has created a more challenging environment for founders who are trying to raise capital.
In the first three months of the year, venture capital investments in the U.S. dropped to $37 billion, their lowest level in 13 consecutive quarters, according to a recent PitchBook report.
