Replit raises $100 million

Investors continue to pour money into generative AI technology. For example, Replit, a startup IDE who develops an AI-based code generation tool called Ghostwriter, collection this week nearly $100 million ($97,4 million) with a subsequent valuation of $1.160 billion.

Andreessen Horowitz led the round - a series B expansion - with participation from Khosla Ventures, Coatue, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Bloomberg Beta, Naval Ravikant, ARK Ventures and Hamilton Helmer.

"We are relentless in our mission to empower one billion software developers," Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad said in a statement, adding that the new funding - which brings the total raised by Replit to more than $200 million dollars - will go towards further developing the core experience of the product, expanding Replit's cloud services and "driving innovation" in AI.

"AI has already brought that future closer," Masad continued. "We are looking forward to expanding our offering for professional developers."

Based in San Francisco, Replit was co-founded by programmers Amjad Masad, Faris Masad, and designer Haya Odeh in 2016. Prior to creating Replit, Amjad Masad worked in engineering roles at Yahoo and Facebook, where he created software development tools.

Replit offers a collaborative online IDE that supports a variety of programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, Go, and C++. With Replit, users can share a workspace with one or multiple users and see real-time file edits, message each other, and debug code together. Additionally, users can share projects, ask for help, learn from tutorials, and use templates.

But perhaps its most prominent feature is Ghostwriter, a set of functions powered by an AI model trained with publicly available code. Ghostwriter, like GitHub's Copilot, can make suggestions and explain code, taking into account what users type and other contexts in their accounts, such as the programming languages ​​they use.

Ghostwriter seems to be the driver of Replit's recent explosive growth, which has led to a partnership with Google Cloud and a user base of over 22 million developers. But, like all generative AI tools, it comes with risks and potential legal consequences that have yet to reach the courts.

Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI are being defendants in a class action lawsuit that accuses them of violating copyright law by allowing Copilot to regurgitate sections of licensed code without giving credit. Liability aside, some legal experts have suggested that AI like Copilot could endanger companies if they inadvertently incorporated copyrighted hints from the tool into their production software.

It is not clear if Ghostwriter was also trained on licensed or copyrighted code. But Replit notes that Ghostwriter's suggested code may contain "incorrect, offensive, or inappropriate" strings.

That includes insecure code. According to a recent Stanford study, software engineers who use AI systems to generate code are more likely to cause security vulnerabilities in the applications they develop. Although the study didn't specifically focus on Replit, it stands to reason that developers who use it fall victim to the same thing.