Amjad Masad on Replit Agent 4 Launch and $400M Raise

over there. Let me tell you about vibe.co where DC brands, B2B startups, AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, targets audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. And without further ado, we have Amjad from Replet in the rear waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV ultra. Amod, how are you doing?

Billion dollar man. Good. Good to see you guys.

Congratulations. Tell us what happened. You got some news for us? We got it gone.

Yeah. So, we launched uh Agent 4. Okay. Our fourth generation of of of Replet agents.

Yeah.

And we raised $400 million on a $9 billion valuation.

Let's go.

Been waiting for this. Yes. All week.

Absolutely massive. Do your I feel Do all your fundraisers leak? I like I felt like in my head this this had already happened. Like I feel like somebody's somebody's on to you. They they they always frontr run you.

Yes. Yes. Everything um I don't it's not leaking from us internally but investors

so many different investors.

Silicon Valley is sort of like the ancestral village. It's sort of it's all gossip you know everyone's gossiping all it's it's really annoying but you know that's it is what it is.

Uh yeah. Well it's it's great when it's news like this. Um talk talk about the progress uh at at the product level and then I want to talk about the business. Sure. So, you know, agent 3, we focus on this idea of autonomy and it was, if you remember back to the olden days of, you know, August, September last year,

agents weren't running for all that long, you know, 5 minutes, people were excited about that. Agent 3 was the first agent to run for like hours. Uh and since then you know we've had the autonomous revolution with u open claw and and many other things. It kind of entered the public consciousness and since then we've been asking the question if we just take for a fact that agents are going to be doing a lot of our our our work a lot of our manual sort of technical work what is the role of a human and as I you know as we observed sort of internally people are spending a lot of time in design thinking and systems design. and they're spending a lot of time on whiteboards. Whiteboards were never used at rapid and now they're used all the time. And so as we started thinking about agent 4, we're like, okay, we want to make it around this idea of like creativity because we think that what's left for us as humans to do ultimately is just be creative and build new things and figure out what uh what what's the next thing to build, what's what's exciting to do, do more exploration, build a lot more things. So, Replet agent 4 is uh kind of the kind of flagship feature is that there's a canvas and inside that canvas is basically everything that that you're building. You can generate designs and mockups. You can build um your backend and web app. You can build your automations and agents. You can build your mobile app. You can build a slide deck. It's sort of your your cockpit control panel for your business. Um, and there's a lot of technology that went into making all that seamless. A big part of it is parallel agents and collaboration. So every time we you start a task, we fork the entire virtual machine and database and everything. Create an entirely new environment where an agent is is running autonomously on that. All the while you're just designing and you don't really care about what's happening under the hood. Um and so we think it's an entirely new way of not just vibe coding but working uh in general because it's affecting every department of the of the business from marketing to sales to to everything else because every everyone like coding has become the new interface for knowledge work and this is where replet's headed as well.

Can you talk a little bit about the top of funnel? You're a master of going direct. I mean you're one of the few tech CEOs that you've been on Joe Rogan, right?

Yes.

That's insane. Uh congratulations. It's amazing. But uh but but uh what is the mix? How do you think about actually uh growing the top of funnel at a time when there's a knife fight for every new AI user, but there's also 10 new AI users coming into the category every day?

Yeah, we actually haven't invested. You know, I think a something that could be a superpower can be also a bit of a something you over rely on. So, me going direct and just using my my platform, we haven't really built out the marketing function as much as many of the other players in the market. So, we're we're just starting to do that. The Asian 4 launch, you might have seen, we've just really upgraded our style and how how we talk about our product. We just did a brand refresh. So, you know, the the the funding is also recognizing like $400 million is a lot of money, especially since we really haven't made a huge dent in our previous fundraising, but it's recognizing that there's going to be a knife fight. Luckily, Rapler continues to grow very strongly organically. Um, especially in enterprise adoption. Sure.

Like the enterprise adoption has been really fantastic. I saw you guys talking about Mercedes. Mercedes is a customer. No way. Like it's really mind-blowing how many industries are just jumping on this. um you know financial services ax is a customer you know you know fintech PayPal plaid is a customer I really can't think hotels I can't think of anything that any company that is not really impacted by this so the growth continues to be strong but yes uh I think uh there's so much money pouring into ads and all of that so we have to play that game too

you mentioned a brand refresh what percentage of replet users do you think understand the name now

probably rounds down to zero

really

because you have abstracted away the read val print loop right so the no one knows what a ripple is anymore it's going to go away

but in spirit it is I mean a big part of agent 4 is recognizing that

agentic coding actually

was a huge was an amazing improvement right but

it made it so that computing went back to the mainframe era where you type a prompt and then you sit back and wait for the prompt to to kind of execute.

We're like, you know, that kind of sucks. That really takes us away from that ripple,

you know, vision of like rapid iteration.

So agent 4, the idea of like parallel background agents brings back that iterative loop. So I think it lives in in spirit. I don't think people

I still think it's a great name. Uh even if even if it's just like a little uh if you know you know for people to program before the during during the fundra process. How how did you talk with investors about kind of how you foresee the dynamic between Replet and the labs? You guys like are very uh uh work well together but at the same time compete more and more on a on on different dimensions. Like how do you how do you see that

evolving? Uh I I think to date it's like the market has been just expanding

so rapidly that companies can be competing with each other but also working together and everyone's growing. Um but how where does this go? It starts with with this idea that we live and breathe our mission of empowering people to make software, right? I mean, I've been working on this for what 15 20 years now. You know, I at code overnight

success years ago.

The idea was that anyone should be able to make software. I mean, we you know, I've been obsessed with this for so long and the team now, everyone's here just to solve that that thing. If you're at OpenAI and Anthropic, great companies, but you're also trying to cure cancer, improve math, and do all this other stuff, which is amazing, and I really hopeful that they can succeed at that. But the kind of focus that we have on the the just general population to be able to be empowered, no one else has. I think a, you know, they're doing great, but, you know, they're massively subsidizing their services in order to to acquire users, which is fine. That's that's what you got to do. But uh I think if you go to replet, it's really the best place for you as a creative, as a business person, as a solo entrepreneur to build build your business. And the feature gap, especially after agent 4, between us and anything else is is really really wide and we'll continue to make it wider. I mean, agent one was really the first, you know, consumer approachable agent on the market back in 2024. That was before cloud code. And so we have a track record of continuing to innovate and and you know I moods don't matter anymore. Maybe you can have a lot of capital and you can subsidize a lot of things and you can spend a lot in marketing but at the end of the day the market will rationalize and the best product will win and that's been the case in the history of Silicon Valley. I think

uh given given that you're not trying to play the same kind of capital war game, how like how what's your guys's philosophy around like trying to create the best product experiences but also not uh you know even for for the users and for yourself as a platform. You don't want to just be generating the most number of tokens. You want to be sort of as efficient as possible uh and get the user what they want to do which is build something but do it in in a way that uh is not overly costly for the platform or the individual user.

Yeah. Um I I there's a lot of innovation behind this like one advantage of being uh you know at the infra or app layer of AI is that you can use any model. Um you know for example we utilize a lot of Gemini flash which is like a great model at like code search at like design and so we find a lot of efficiencies from being able to create this like society of models which is a thesis that I wrote back back in 22 uh it's not going to be one single model every model is going to be better at at different things there there was a moment of time I like oh you know Opus is going to be able is is AGI gonna be it's still you know when you go to replet it's really four or five different classes of models doing different things. So that's an important piece of it. The other thing is like internally we don't set AR metrics. I think there's a lot there's a lot of focus on AR and AR in the age of AI. I don't think it's AR in the same way that like a SAS business was ARR because you're sort of like you know you you're selling these tokens and yeah you can push a bug and get better ARR because you're spending more more tokens and so it becomes a bit of a optimizing for the wrong thing. So we for example we look a lot at sentiment analysis like how people are actually when people get angry they'll tell the agent like you know that that they're angry. So we look we look a lot at that look at success deployment. We're increasingly looking at how much money people are generating when they're building a business with Replet because now you can hook in Stripe and other payment providers. So it's really about what you measure and we're increasingly trying to measure the quality of the output as opposed to like the the whatever AR metric there is. What advice are you giving to the youngest new hires at Replet these days about skill development, where they should be focusing, how they can build a career at a company that is growing really significantly and will probably be around for decades if not centuries.

Well, first of all, the the roles are are collapsing, you know. Um, we have designers shipping code.

We have engineers shipping design. We have sales people shipping code.

We have engineers doing sales. Our vision for the future of work is that everyone has to be an entrepreneur.

Okay.

And we're going to be all massively levered by agents doing all sorts of things. So the particular skill is not the bottleneck anymore. it is how ambitious you are, how generative you are, how creative you are, and how good are you at utilizing these tools. And you know, there's been a lot of doom and gloom about like younger people go coming into the workplace right now uh with focus on like entry- level jobs going away. We're actually we're trying to hire as many new grads as we can. uh we're we're finding that a lot of young people are, you know, agent maxing and so you need to be running, you know, 100 parallel agents and and trying a ton of different ideas. You know, we don't really um police token consumption internally at Ralph because we want people to be doing as much as possible. Um, so I think I think it's a really a golden era for a lot of young people coming up right now in the in the job market because when at our time you kind of

you know you go and interview and become a Java 2E software engineer doing global migrations like that's your title, right?

Like it's no longer the case. We just want people to come and and do things and I I I think that's that's incredibly exciting.

That's awesome. What's the craziest token bill you've seen uh someone on your team put up in a single month? Has anyone pulled in five figures, six figures, like order of magnitude? How big are we talking for the craziest person?

I I I've seen single runs that are in the thousands of dollars when we enabled uh Opus Turbo.

Sure. Fast mode. Yeah.

Which which which of you know highway robbery. that part we're actually like a little more careful about.

Yeah. Yeah. Like maybe we'll check on this tomorrow. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Go go go have lunch and come back. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the progress.

Thank you guys. Great to see you.

We will talk to you soon. I'm John. Have a great day.

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