Why We Invested in Replit
“Idea to software, fast.”
We’re happy to announce our $20M investment in Replit, which underscores our excitement about their bold vision to empower the next billion software creators.
One of the fastest-growing software development platforms in the world, Replit is revolutionizing development with their all-in-one software creation platform. Replit vertically integrates the developer toolchain and the computing environment, drastically reducing the barriers to becoming a software creator. Replit’s browser-based, multiplayer functionality encourages collaboration so multiple users can work within the same coding environment. What’s more, Replit’s AI co-pilot and features support users at each phase of their software creation journey. This all-encompassing, collaborative, AI-first approach underpins the company’s slogan: “idea to software, fast.”
At its core, Replit is a classic example of product-led growth — Craft’s specialty. Their phenomenal community engagement and organic traffic growth of more than 28M users since 2016 has led to a massive, loyal user base; we immediately saw that Replit’s collaborative product was built for viral scale. Now, with business usage kicking in, all the core tenants for building an effective PLG strategy are in place.
Replit AI’s code complete feature was one of the first proprietary, self-trained LLMs that outperformed incumbents and gained significant praise by end-users. Replit has become a popular destination for writing python-based AI prototypes, which gives them a front-row seat to some of the top AI companies being built in our industry. AI is key to Replit’s “idea to software, fast” slogan and their near term roadmap is being built under the premise that AI will redefine every single Replit feature. Ultimately, Replit believes that AI will become synonymous with coding — and we agree.
Replit’s movement to empower global developers has led to countless software creators around the world learning to code, contributing to projects through Replit’s marketplace, and building their own businesses on the Replit platform. At Craft’s 3-day HackAIthon in May, we were amazed at the number of Replit-powered products built by the 300+ hackers and creators. In fact, the winner of the “non-technical” category — the builder was not a traditional engineer/coder and used AI to write the code for them — built her project on Replit.
While Replit did not need any additional capital, founder/CEO Amjad Masad and CFO Kyle Alisharan were considering a tender offer to bring liquidity to employees. Craft’s investment allowed Replit to orchestrate this liquidity event, which empowers their talented team to make a long-term commitment to the company. From the early conversations between Amjad, Kyle, and the Craft team, it became clear that our PLG expertise would help Replit unlock and accelerate their next phase of growth. Over the past few months, the exceptional Replit team and Craft’s investors and operators with PLG operating backgrounds (Yammer, Dropbox, ClickUp, Figma, Dropbox, and Slack) have begun to execute on a product-led growth strategy.
While there is much more we’d like to share with you, Replit’s Developer Day is happening on November 14. Visit https://devday.replit.com/ to hear more.
Written by Michael Robinson and Kevin Gabura
