Replit’s Amjad Masad on the Cursor deal, fighting Apple, and why it wouldn’t sell

Amjad Masad has been building Replit for ten years, but the last 18 months have been another. The AI ​​coding support company is on track for $2.8 million in gross revenue in 2024 and is on track for what Masad describes as a billion-dollar annual revenue.

On TechCrunch it’s sold out StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, we discussed a lot in a short time, starting with the question that everyone in the industry is asking right now: in the country that the competitor Cursor is said to be in talks to be acquired by SpaceX. $60 billionShould Replit also sell? We also delved into Replit’s revenue – the number of existing customers who grow their revenue – which Masad says is up to 300%, his willingness to go to court with Apple over what he called a lie in its App Store battle with Replit, and the company’s ability to start selling its customers.

On the subject of independence, Masad was unequivocal. Unlike Cursor, which he said has been operating at a 23% error rate, he said Replit has the resources to make the process viable — even if he stops short of selling it altogether.

The following has been edited for accuracy and clarity:

TC: SpaceX’s Cursor deal was the talk of the industry last week. What did you do with it?

AM: It’s hard to be an independent, small AI company developing on a startup basis, especially if you’re burning through a lot of cash. Another part of the report shows that Cursor has a margin of error of 23%, and if you also want to invest in training, it makes it difficult to be independent.

For us at Replit, maybe because we want different customers, we have been able to run the business efficiently. We have been lucky for over a year. We are a little expensive, but we offer a lot. Our target audience is usually non-technical users who have not developed any software. We provide an end-to-end platform – from instant to deployed software that can scale. We take care of security, database, database migration. And we’ve been doing this long enough that we’ve built up a lot of history on the platform.

Is Replit for sale? I think you are talking to those who have access to it all the time; it is your responsibility to be honest.

Yes. We have amazing friends, and sometimes they bring up these topics. But we will try to be independent. I want us to remain an independent company. We’ve been around for 10 years, before it was accepted that you can program from scratch. We talked about making programmers a billionaire in 2018 at YC, and people sometimes laughed at that dream. Now that dream is possible, and we started this transition with what we experienced in September 2024. It just feels like we can keep going.

You work closely with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. If you chose them – who is doing the best?

Anthropic is still invincible on the core agetic loop. They have a good calling tool; the agent can stay connected for a long time. GPT-5 is working fast. Google Flash’s color options are amazing for the price. If you want something quick and cheap, they’re beating open source right now. We use all three, and I honestly wouldn’t rule out new labs. Reflection AI is coming out with open source models that we feel are very good. And the Chinese models are impressive – Kimi is good as an example of the Anthropic generation since January, so only three months left.

When you are in business, what do you gain?

Most of our products are organic or organic – inspired by many things. We’ve found clients like Zillow and Meta through people taking the product and raising their hands to buy business plans. When it comes down to it and when it’s cooked, we often win in sales. But even if we lack visibility, when it comes to the C-suite and the IT team, Replit wins on security. Many vibe-coding tools will create the website and connect it to external data – a great asset, but it makes security more difficult, because this data is open to the public and you have to organize line security, which is very difficult for developers who are not technicians. The answer is full, it is a database built into the project and not open to the public – which makes the program very secure.

We’ve also spent 10 years fighting fraudsters and crypto scammers, so our cyber security service is as good as a dedicated cybersecurity startup. Every time you upload an app to Replit, we create a remote project on Google Cloud. We are Google security adopters.

Can we talk about churn? How long do you keep customers if the best prototypes are rebuilt into a pile of existing companies?

Churn is very low, and net retention is very high – 300% in some cases. What we hear from customers is that when engineers panic and try to rebuild their own software, they often end up worse. As businesses become comfortable with the entire Replit stack – especially when we set them up in a single environment – they keep apps on Replit. Bain & Company, for example, replaced Tableau with Power BI and Replit with Databricks.

There is a growing concern about AI bloat – non-technical users create more code and burn more tokens. This is good for you (depending on your spending). What about your customers?

We don’t have a lot of money to worry about. Businesses are very aware of ROI, and they tell us about the returns they are getting. For the most part they see that the money is worth it – usually one, two, three grand. If they spend $100,000 a month with Replit, they usually generate $2 million, $3 million, $10 million in some kind of return.

Let’s talk about Apple. Another enemy, Beloved, has just been acquired app-building app approved by the App Store this week. Replit has been in App Store Purgatory, with Apple blocking your updates for months. How does this hurt you?

It’s not life or death – we can lose the app and it won’t do anything important for our business. But it’s an app that people honestly love. We have been on the App Store for four years. Children from poor communities learn to code on Replit on their Android devices. Leaders use it in meetings.

The reason Replit was closed while others weren’t, we believe, is that Replit makes iOS apps. When we launched this feature in December, there were charts showing the number of apps entering the App Store through us. We think Apple feels threatened by this.

Apple’s reason is that you are downloading new code to the device (after approval), which violates their guidelines.

That is a lie. And we can prove it in court if we have to.

Will that happen?

I hope not. I am an Apple fan, and I would love to work together and create something great. We are happy to refer customers to Xcode (Apple’s development environment). But you can’t run a market where billions of people have access to it and make decisions that are biased or biased.

Just wondering if, like Nvidia, OpenAI and others, you are considering investing in your customers to sell equity?

We have thought a lot about this, and I think so. I have personally invested in several startups that started on Replit before they made money. Some of them, like School of Magic – the teacher decided to take his time during COVID to learn a little bit about vibe writing and create an AI program for other teachers. He found this problem that in America, we burn a lot of teachers. They wanted to use AI to reduce workloads. He did that, and in the first year he made 20 million dollars. Some of the companies that started on Replit, I think, are valued at half a billion. The business going on at Replit right now is very exciting. We integrated with Stripe a few months ago, and transactions going through Replit are growing threefold month over month. In the near future, our customers will earn more than we do.