Replit

Amjad Masad, Faris Masad, and Haya Odeh co-founded Replit in 2016. Amjad Masad who is currently the CEO worked on developer tools previously at Yahoo and Facebook, and helped found Codecademy. The idea for Replit came from a frustrating coding experience he had in 2011 while working at Yahoo The name comes from the acronym REPL, which stands for readevaluateprint loop. Replit launched as an online integrated development environment IDE that originally supported over 50 programming language. The company was initially rejected by Y Combinator three times, but Replit caught Paul Grahams attention on Hacker News, who called Sam Altman, then president of YC, to give them a late interview. This was Replits first pitch deck that raised seed funding in 2016 from Bloomberg Beta and Reach Capital, before the company joined YC. Replit had 750,000 users when they were accepted into YC, grew to 1M users by the time they raised seed funding from a16z in 2018, and crossed 6M users by their Series A in 2020. Replit crossed a $1.16B valuation with their $97M Series B, which followed shortly after the IDE startup released their code-generating AI-powered tool called Ghostwriter. As of February 2024, Replit has over 30 million users and has raised more than $200 million in venture funding from blue-chip investors like Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management, and Khosla Ventures.