Replit has had a turbulent year, but CEO Amjad Masad’s sonorous voice was almost zen-like as he spoke to me on Monday in an airy conference room, sipping coconut water with a view of the sun setting over Foster City, California.
The AI coding company had moved its headquarters out of San Francisco in April, went through layoffs in May, and has seen its headcount cut in half, to about 65 people.
Yet it has grown its revenue five-fold over the past six months, Masad said, thanks to a breakthrough in artificial-intelligence capabilities that enabled a new product called “Agent,” a tool that can write a working software application with nothing but a natural language prompt.
“It was a huge hit,” Masad said. “We launched it in September, and it’s basically the first at-scale working software agent you can try in the world today. And it’s the only one, I would say.”
Replit, which Masad co-founded in 2016, has embraced AI since the beginning, and in recent years it has launched products that automate various aspects of the coding process.