AI Code-Generating Startup Replit Raises $97.4 Million – Valued at $1.16 Billion

Replit, creator of Ghostwriter, this week announced the close of its Series B extension funding round during which the company raised close to $100 million, bringing its valuation up to $1.16 billion post-money.

Over $200 Million Worth of Capital

The IDE startup based in San Francisco completed its Series A funding in early 2021, raising $20 million. Then, in December of that year, Replit held its Series B round, securing $80 million led by Andreessen Horowitz, with contributions from other investors like Volt Capital, Vinay Hiremath, Reach Capital, Fifth Down Capital, Coatue, and Bloomberg Beta.

Since then Andreessen Horowitz has played fundamental roles in aiding the startup to grow and make sound decisions. For instance, last year, it advised and led the startup away from a $ 1 billion acquisition offer.

The Series B extension round which just closed added $97.4 million to the company’s capital, bringing its total funding to over $200 million. This round, also led by Andreessen Horowitz, saw participation from Khosla Ventures, Coatue, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Bloomberg Beta, Naval Ravikant, ARK Ventures, and Hamilton Helmer.

In a statement, Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad said “We are relentless in our mission to empower a billion software developers.” He explained the new funds would be used for “driving innovation” in AI, increasing Replit’s cloud capabilities, and improving the core product experience.

“AI has already brought that future closer. We look forward to expanding our offerings for professional developers,” he added.

Replit is a startup that develops integrated development environments (IDE) with its flagship product, GhostWriter, which is a generative AI tool that generates code for software development.

The startup was cofounded in 2016 by designer Haya Odeh and programmers Amjad Masad and Faris Masad. Before establishing Replit, Amjad worked as an engineer at Yahoo and Google, where he built software development tools.

On its online IDE, Replit offers a wide range of programming languages including Javascript, Python, C++, and Go. The IDE enables developers to share and collaborate in a workspace, observe real-time changes to files, communicate with one another, and debug code in real-time. Users may also ask for assistance, use templates, exchange projects, and learn from tutorials.

Its crown product, Ghostwriter, which functions similarly to GitHub CoPilot, was trained on publicly available code to provide suggestions and explain code based on what users enter and other account-related information, such as the programming languages they are using.

Replit Partners with Google Against Microsoft’s GitHub

Ghostwriter appears to be accelerating the growth of Replit seeing as the startup strategically partnered with Google’s Cloud Division to avail the tech giant’s cloud infrastructure to developers through the IDE.

“Under the new partnership, Replit developers will get access to Google Cloud infrastructure, services, and foundation models via Ghostwriter, Replit’s software development AI, while Google Cloud and Workspace developers will get access to Replit’s collaborative code editing platform,” Replit said.

Due to this partnership, Replit has attained a user base of 22.5 million developers across the world. The company aims at reaching 1 billion developers which will make it the most popular IDE against GitHub which had 100 million users as of January.

However, Generative AI is a field filled with risks, especially potential legal repercussions that have not yet been fully explored in court. For instance, in a class action complaint, Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI have been charged with breaking copyright rules by allowing Copilot to repurpose licensed bits of code without giving due acknowledgment.

Whether Ghostwriter also received training on licensed or copyrighted code is yet to be established. However, Replit does point out the code Ghostwriter proposes might include “incorrect, offensive, or otherwise inappropriate” lines.

AiDoge – Harnessing the power of AI

Investors intrigued by AI-based products should consider turning their attention to AiDoge, a platform that harnesses the power of AI technology to produce memes while keeping up with the dynamic world of cryptocurrency.

The platform’s AI-based meme generator creates customized memes based on users’ text prompts. It also provides several other features such as using Ai tokens for purchasing credits and staking to receive daily credit rewards, promoting long-term engagement, and ensuring platform stability.

AiDoge’s presale aims to raise funds for the development of the ambitious platform. Despite an expected listing price of $0.0000336, investors can currently purchase 1 AI token for $0.000026, representing a 22.6% gain before the project lists on exchanges.

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