Replit, a San Francisco-based web-based IDE, has recently secured $100 million in funding for their outstanding efforts in developing a tool called Ghostwriter, a code generating AI-powered tool that competes with Github Copilot. This funding has further increased their post-money evaluation to $1.16 billion. The round was headed by Andreessen Horowitz with participants from Khosla Ventures, Coatue, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Bloomberg Beta, Naval Ravikant, ARK Ventures, and Hamilton Helmer. With this fundraising, Replit has been able to leapfrog its total funds to over $200 million to fund the development of the core product experience, expansion of cloud services, and to drive innovation in the field of AI.
Replit was founded in 2016 by programmers Amjad Masad, Faris Masad and designer Haya Odeh. Amjad had previously been working in engineering roles at Yahoo and Facebook. Replit is a web platform that offers an online collaborative IDE that supports different programming languages like JavaScript, Python, Go and C++. With this platform, developers can collaborate on projects, real-time editing, debugging, and communication across files.
The standout feature amongst the others is Ghostwriter, a suite of features powered by AI models trained on publicly available code. Ghostwriter is similar to GitHub Copilot; it makes suggestions, gives explanations on the code, based on the particle context and what programming language the user is using. With its help, Replit has been able to amass an impressive user base of 22 million developers. But Ghostwriter does have its own risks; developers would not want to get into a situation where they are using copyrighted code without giving appropriate credit.
The founders of Replit, especially Amjad Masad, have been celebrating the success of their new funding, and they are committed to helping developers all across the globe through the innovative solutions they are offering. They are looking forward to expanding their offerings to professional developers, and make the dream of a better and brighter world powered by AI a reality.
