Amjad Masad raises $250M at $3B valuation as Replit agent runs autonomously for hours

night risk-f free trial, free returns, free shipping. You heard Nico Rosberg talk about the importance of sleep. You need an eight sleep. Anyway, we have Jod from Replet in the reream waiting room bringing him in. He has some fantastic news for us. Break it down. Welcome back to the show. Great to see you.

Thanks for having me here, guys. Good to see you again. Look fantastic. You look uh yeah, ju just great lighting. You look healthy. You look like you're deadlifting more than ever. I feel like there's been a PR in the recent in the recent history. I won't hold you.

No, I've done I've done a bit of a PR on on just getting healthier in general. Actually, weightlifting is really bad for you. Powerlifting especially, you get cuz once you start chasing weights, sure, you you know, you you're fine with getting fat and you're fine with anything.

You're you're willing to die to to add that extra pound on your lift and it's just a bad sport in general. Yeah. Well, yeah, John and I John and I go back and forth here. John's John's uh very fixated on, you know, constant improvement in the gym. I'm I'm more so like, you know, uh I want to be strong and healthy.

Uh but uh anyways, it it uh you're what did Delian say the other week? It's like you're always either like adding to your one rep max or or losing or losing. So, it's one way or the other. Uh well, did you see what did you see what Grown Daniel uh said about uh powerlifting? What did he say?

It's like if you if you want to look ugly and feel [ __ ] take up powerlifting. Yeah. It's not for the aesthetics for sure. Yeah. Anyway, uh PR on fundraising. So, congrats on that. What's the news? Thank you. Yeah, we raised $250 million. Uh congratulations. Let's go. Let's go.

at at a $3 billion valuation led by Prism Capital uh with AX and Google joining the round and a bunch of our uh lovely investors such as Andre and YC and others kind of doubling down. Fantastic.

Uh massive takeoff, fast takeoff in in revenue and users like like the the vibe coding air is definitely a narrative that's that that that's you know on a tear right now. Correct. Yeah, but but we're actually trying to change the game a little bit.

Like I think VIP coding is is is awesome, but ultimately like what Replet is and what I've been trying to do for a long time is make it so that anyone can make software. VIP coding is still somewhat coding. You're still sitting in front of an IDE and like most people don't want to do that.

Like a lot of people like it, but people just want to solve problems, startups. Y that's why they do, you know, coding. And so replet agent 3 uh we our target is for it to feel like a human developer for it to work on your behalf.

And so uh the main target we set from like a research perspective is can we make it run for 200 minutes. So when we went from agent one to agent two went from 2 minutes to 20 minutes. So now from 20 minutes to 300 200 minutes. And actually I'm seeing people show me apps they built that it's taken 4 hours on its own.

It can boot up a browser window test the app for you. It can run unit tests. It can review its code. And we have this adversarial relationship between like Claude and GT5 Gemini arguing and fighting. And so it's like this multi- aent system. Uh and it's really the state-of-the-art autonomous coding agent.

And so the the idea is not to vibe code. The idea is to to build things. And often times you don't even have to be in in front of the computer for that to happen. How big of an opportunity is mobile? Mobile is huge. Like so a lot of our customers are actually executives. So I I was at the end summit.

We hosted the AI dinner uh brought down from Seattle Lloyd Frank from um the co-founder of uh Zillow and he is Replet's champion at the firm. Right. This is uh executive uh chairman of of of the board. uh and you know a lot of his times in in between meetings and things like that.

So he can like boot up properly on his phone and we have a lot of other CEOs. I've heard the story uh secondhand that you know Vlad from Robin Hood uh would like prototype applications uh on Replet on his phone in meetings to kind of show engineers what they should go and build.

And so I think it really changes the game. It's no longer about being a computer nerd sitting in front of a computer. It's about making things whether it's on your phone, on your, you know, hopefully in the future even, you know, uh, you can just talk to Replet via your headphones and it just goes and does the thing.

Yep. No, no, I I I think that there's there's that meme of like where you sit in the org is correlated to how many monitors you have, right? And it's like the person who's like keeping the entire app online, like the genius systems engineer has three monitors.

Then like the the product manager has like you know one extra monitor and a laptop that they take to meetings and then the CEO is just on their phone all the time and giving the CEO or or executive who's just on their phone the ex the ability to express themselves in software is extremely powerful. Uh I'm interested.

Oh sorry.

How how do you think about uh projecting and forecasting market size of code generation broadly because Replet was early to the to this space but it's heavily competitive with via you know there was even uh now that I think about it at at demo day there was a the other day there was a company that I was kind of thinking when I heard the pitch like this feels like um basically like a feature of Replet, right?

Um, so it's just like hyper competitive space. But at the same time, the world test flight specifically. Is that the one you're Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But but the world just wants more and more and more code and the cheaper you make it to make code, the more the world wants it.

But I'm curious how you think about kind of the overall uh market opportunity. First of all, super vindicated, right? Like I've been talking about this since I was a teenager. You know, I was working at, you know, code academy and uh we were saying anyone can learn to code. Everyone wants to make software.

And everyone's like, "Well, you should learn to be a plumber cuz everyone needs plumbing. " I was like, "No, it's different. Like, we need an abundance of code. You don't need an abundance of plumbing. " And people Yeah. And and so it's awesome. Like I I think we lit a fire and now the forest is on fire, right?

But um and that's that's always I think good. I think the look, there's a zero sum market and there's a positive sum market. The zero sum market is a professional engineering market. You see the co-pilot versus cursor chart and as as as cursor is rising, co-pilot is going in market share. That's a zero sum market.

Now you see it with codeex and clot code. Um and so there's only so many tools that software engineers can use. But like I said, we're bringing we're you know executives are making software uh salespeople, marketing people, doctors, nurses, everyone.

I haven't like at this point I've over the past year I've heard every profession under the sun has used replet in some use case and so I think the market size is is is is probably the market size of software the market size of computers right and and by the way this is the original vision of computing when the original creators of computers that's what they envisioned they envision that you buy a computer and you program it that's how you use it they didn't like envision the software industry and I That's that's the true essence of you know how computing could be really really powerful is the ability for anyone to program it.

So that's one. Another sort of we did it like a one more thing as part of the our agent 3 announcement and it's a sort of this low-key launch that I think will will will you know transform our business over time and it's the ability for replet agent to make other agents.

So we've gotten really good at making agents and now we're imbuing that knowledge into the agent itself. And what we're finding in the enterprise is that a lot of people want to solve problems. Software is a mean means of solving problems. You create an app and then you use that app to take an action, right?

But a lot of times you an agent can take an action on your behalf. And so you can create an HR agent, a sales agent. Uh you know there there's there's so many things that could be automated and there's an entire industry that's going to emerge around vertical agents and that's fine.

But a lot of times you need a very domain specific like HR onboarding agent for the idiosyncratic bespoke way we do onboarding on in our company and the only person who knows how to do it is one HR ops person at our company and so uh you know now agents can make other agents and that market size is also dissing dizzingly large because that starts to displace uh white collar labor labor in many ways.

On the topic of just more and more code endlessly, um I'm interested to know how you think instantiation of code will live in the consumer world over time. And I'll give you an example. So uh I've I've fired off deeper research reports in in OpenAI's chat GPT.

I've also once gone to claude code and said with same prompt um do all the deep research but then instantiate it as an HTML site that is mobile responsive and can use all different HTML tables and you can tell that when deep research fills in from chat GPT.

It has the ability to use markdown and create a table but it can't just pull a random JavaScript library and create an interactive bar chart. It can't randomly throw images in and and and add all these different divs that you could possibly do on HTML.

And so I was thinking about, you know, are we gonna get to a world where you open up your favorite LLM chat app, and in order to answer the problem, it's building a widget, building a piece of software.

The same way when you go to Google and you ask for 2 plus2, it it just gives you a calculator, an actual HTML calculator. You can instantiate that calculator in code. And and so I'm I'm wondering how you think the market will look in like five I don't know 10 years or something like how much I think you Yeah.

I think you hit on something super important. I think it is easy to look at this and say this is the market for codegen. Yeah. No, it's a market for software. Yeah.

uh the again if you go back to history when you know Turing wrote his 1936 paper that you know invented the the computer the Turing machine it's about universal computation is that you know computers can be these dynamic systems right and we know initially computers were these fancy calculators you couldn't program them in software you had to kind of you know rewire them and then von Newman in the you know 50 40s 50s uh created the stored program computer and the idea is that you can suddenly program them and you know every computer we have right now is a von von Newman machine and I think this moment is as big as that moment you went from static computers to programmable computers now we're going from static software to dynamic and malleable software so every piece of software application you're going to be working with will be generating software on the fly pulling packages uh on the fly and creating bespoke software for your use case.

So you know uh instead of like going and buying Tableau to do this one exact thing you can go to replet or or manis or even chach will do it in the future and all of that and depending on how depth of the power is I think replet is going to be the most powerful sure but but of course you can use any of the other tools and they're going to generate the the bespoke software that you need for that exact use case and I think that's a very exciting future.

Yeah, there will be sort of like complexity when you see some of these insane uh cloud backlogs where you have like Google and Microsoft and Oracle and everybody's reporting like we have backlogs in the hundreds of billions and the and and I think Wall Street looks at that and they say okay where's this where's this revenue really going to where's this how is this revenue I mean sorry but like that's not what Wall Street's reaction was Wall Street's reaction was like oh the money's in the bank like let's drive the talk higher saying to more critical investors like that's a lot of money being thrown around a lot of numbers where what how do you you know make it but but on your side as you see you know the entire market of software shifting from you know we make software and we sell a lot a lot of times to we make software continuously for the needs of our business.

Do those kind of backlogs start to make sense to you? Um, I think so. Look, I'm I'm not an investor. We might be in a bubble in the short term, but I am confident that the long-term value of this technology, especi especially as it pertains to LLM's making software is massive.

In some sense, it's going to displace existing value. So, that's in the vertical point solution SAS space. I think it'll start doing some jobs that otherwise humans have been doing.

So that there existing value capture from the existing um market but it's also going to fundamentally change how we use computers, how we run our businesses. Businesses can be a lot more efficient.

Um and uh I I think that like you know an economist or philosopher need to start thinking about what the future of work would look like when everyone has a fully autonomous programmer in their pocket. It's, you know, every company is bottlenecked by software.

Every company in the world from one person company to a 100,000 person company. So when your finance team um needed this like data to be pipelineed from like Stripe and other places so they can run certain analysis, they're bottlenecked by data engineering.

But if I can like let loose you know replet or clock code whatever and just say like go figure out these data sources and plum them in so I can run SQL queries on them and then 3 or 4 hours later you have that ready then you know you unblocked yourself you create massive improvements to your processes and also you don't need the engineers to go work on the side quest and they can focus on the core software that the company is building.

Fantastic. We went viral last time asking you advice for young people. Let's get your updated thinking. Should you learn to code in 2025? What do you want to do? I would say like do you want to start a startup? Go [ __ ] start a startup.

like go to replet, put your idea in and you know in 20 minutes you'll get a prototype and then once you have a better idea of what you want to build you can put in a larger prompt and have it run for 3 hours and then come back to you with a product that maybe you can release even in the first day.

Is that what you want to do now? You want to be a specialist. You want to go work on you know writing C soft provable C software for the you know next Apollo program. Yeah, go get a PhD in computer science. But really, it comes down to what you want to do.

I think the future is entrepreneurship and not just entrepreneurship in building businesses, but also what we're seeing is there's a lot of entrepreneurs within companies that are creating tremendous value.

We hear of companies all the time employees using Replet creating millions of dollars of revenue for the company and they're not engineers. They're operations people, product managers and all all sorts of people are now empowered to do that.

But I think the main skill uh the main set of skills is going to be resourcefulness. Uh I think the worst thing you could do is be do what you're told today. The worst thing you could do is perhaps listen to your parents. And here you go. Maybe that goes goes wild. There we go.

Okay, that was a good answer because you know look I think that you know all the advice is outdated and I think uh we're entering a very dynamic era and I think you know especially young people need to think for themselves.

They'll know much better than their teachers, their parents, everyone else what they need to focus on, what kind of skills they need to learn. Thank you so much. Be able to make things the robots will do all of the process. Yep. You just need to ideate the idea. Yeah, that's true.

The human spirit that we're not we're never going to lose that. That's the human spirit. I agree. Uh thank you so much for taking on the on the on the new round. Always a pleasure. We'll talk to you soon guys. All right. Talk. Bye. Let me tell you about public. com investing for those that take it