Replit’s Amjad Masad on the Cursor deal, fighting Apple, and why he’d rather not sell Connie Loizos 4:06 PM PDT · May 1, 2026 Amjad Masad has been building Replit for a decade, but the last 18 months have been something else entirely. The AI coding assistant company went from $2.8 million in revenue in all of 2024 to tracking toward what Masad describes as a billion-dollar annual run rate.
At TechCrunch’s sold-out StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, we covered a lot of ground in a short time, beginning with the question everyone in the industry is asking right now: in a world where rival Cursor is reportedly in talks to be acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion , is Replit also bound to sell? We also got into Replit’s net revenue retention — a measure of how much existing customers expand their spending — which Masad says is reaching as high as 300%, his willingness to take Apple to court over what he called outright lies in its App Store battle with Replit, and the possibility of the company beginning to invest in its own customers.
On the question of independence, Masad was unambiguous. Unlike Cursor, which he said has been operating at negative 23% gross margins, he argued Replit has the economics to make that path viable — even if he stopped short of ruling out a sale entirely.
The following has been edited for length and clarity:
TC: Cursor’s reported SpaceX deal was the talk of the industry last week. What did you make of it?
AM: It’s kind of hard being an independent, smaller AI company that’s building on foundation models, especially if you’re burning a ton of cash. Part of the reporting suggested Cursor has negative 23% margins, and if you’re also wanting to invest in training models, that makes it incredibly hard to stay independent.
For us at Replit, partly because we target a different customer set, we’ve been able to run the business more rationally. We’ve been gross margin positive for over a year. We’re slightly more expensive, but we provide a lot more. Our audience tends to be mostly non-technical users who previously haven’t been able to create any software. We provide an end-to-end platform — from the prompt all the way to a deployed application that can scale. We handle security, databases, database migration. And we’ve been doing this long enough that we’ve built a lot of those primitives into the platform.
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Yeah. We have amazing partners, and they sometimes bring up these topics. But we’re going to try to stay independent. I would love for us to remain an independent company. We’ve been around for 10 years, before it was even accepted that you could make apps just from ideas. We were talking about creating a billion software creators back in 2018 at YC, and people sometimes actually laughed at that dream. Now that dream is possible, and we kicked off this revolution with our agentic coding experience in September 2024. It just feels like we can take it much further.
You work closely with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. If you had to rank them — who’s doing it best?
Anthropic is still undefeated on the core agentic loop. They have the best tool calling; the agent can stay coherent much longer. GPT-5 is catching up quickly. Google’s Flash family of models is just amazing on price-performance. If you want something fast and cheap, they’re actually beating open source right now. We use all three, and honestly I wouldn’t discount the newer labs either. Reflection AI is coming out with open-source models we’re hearing great things about. And the Chinese models are impressive — Kimi is as good as an Anthropic-generation model from January, so it’s only about three months behind.
When you’re in a bake-off for an enterprise deal, what wins it for you?
Most of our sales are inbound or organic — very product-led. We’ve acquired customers like Zillow and Meta purely through people adopting the product and then raising their hand to buy an enterprise plan. When it does go top-down and there’s a formal bake-off, we usually win on product. But even in cases where we might be missing a feature, once it hits the C-suite and the IT group, Replit wins on security. A lot of vibe-coding tools will generate a website and connect it to an external database — great products, but it makes security much harder, because the database is open to the public and you need to configure row-level security, which is especially difficult for non-technical builders. Replit being full stack, with the database built into the project and not open to the public — that makes the app inherently more secure.
We also spent 10 years battling crypto scammers and hackers, so our cybersecurity function is as good as a dedicated cybersecurity startup. Every time you deploy an app on Replit, we create an entirely new isolated project on Google Cloud. We inherit Google’s security model.
Can we talk about churn? How long do you hold onto customers if the best prototypes eventually get rebuilt into a company’s existing stack?
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