Replit grabs $400M at $9B valuation in the AI coding race with OpenAI and Cursor
- ByStartupStory | January 23, 2026
San Francisco–based Replit is reportedly raising a fresh $400 million round that would push its valuation to $9 billion, a sharp leap from the $3 billion price tag it carried just months ago. In September last year, the company raised $250 million from Prysm Capital, Google’s AI Futures Fund, Amex Ventures, and a16z, among others. This time, Toronto-based venture firm Georgian is said to lead the raise.
The jump in valuation reflects more than investor confidence in the company. Replit operates in coding, which is one of the most competitive corners of AI now. Its tools put it in direct competition with OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as fast-rising specialists such as Cursor, the AI-powered coding assistant favoured internally by Nvidia.
Turning natural language into real apps
Replit’s foundation is anchored in a strong leadership story. The founder and CEO, Amjad Masad, a Jordanian-American entrepreneur and former engineer at Facebook and Codecademy, co-founded Replit with Faris Masad and Haya Odeh. Their mission is clear: democratise software creation and leverage AI to empower a billion developers and entrepreneurs
What sets Replit apart is how aggressively it is pushing “vibe coding” into everyday use. The company has launched Mobile Apps on Replit for iOS and Android, allowing users to describe an app idea in plain language and watch it turn into a working product. Whether it’s a mobile game, a productivity tool, or a small digital storefront, the platform can generate the app and help publish it to app stores.
This shift moves Replit beyond coding assistance into full product creation. Creators and small businesses can go from concept to a live app in minutes, and to Apple’s App Store in days. The integration with Stripe means monetisation is built in from the start, lowering yet another barrier for first-time builders.
In doing so, Replit is offering a more concrete consumer-facing use case than many larger AI players. While companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google focus on broad platforms and developer tools, Replit is packaging AI into an end-to-end workflow that feels immediately useful.
Riding the wave of vibe coding economics
Vibe coding has become one of the defining trends of the generative AI boom, and momentum has only accelerated into 2026. A major catalyst has been Claude Code, which went viral in tech circles and reportedly hit $1 billion in annualised revenue within six months of launch. Investor appetite has followed closely behind.
Replit’s growth metrics help explain the enthusiasm. The company now has more than 150,000 paying customers and generated $240 million in revenue in 2025. It expects that figure to reach $1 billion in 2026, an ambitious target that underscores how central AI-driven coding has become to modern software development.
Competition remains fierce. Cursor’s creator, Anysphere, raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation late last year, while Europe’s leading player Lovable was recently valued at $6.6 billion. Still, Replit’s focus on accessibility traces back to its founding in 2016 by Amjad Masad, Faris Masad, and designer Haya Odeh, all driven by a simple goal: remove technical barriers and let anyone create software.
Our thoughts
If the latest funding closes as expected, Replit’s rise will stand as one of the clearest signals yet that building apps may soon be more about describing ideas than writing code.
Follow Startup Story
Related Posts
