Replit's Masad Rejects Sale as Cursor Heads to SpaceX
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- Replit grew from $2.8 million in revenue across all of 2024 to tracking toward a billion-dollar annual run rate, CEO Amjad Masad said at TechCrunch's StrictlyVC event in San Francisco.
- Masad said Replit will try to stay independent, contrasting it with rival Cursor, which is reportedly in talks to be acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion while running at negative 23% gross margins; Replit has been gross margin positive for over a year.
- Replit's net revenue retention is reaching 300% in some cases, with Bain & Company replacing Tableau and Power BI with Replit and Databricks after getting comfortable with the full stack.
- Masad called Apple's claim that Replit downloads new code to the device in violation of App Store guidelines 'a lie' and said he is willing to take the company to court; competitor Lovable just had an app-building app approved by Apple this week.
- Replit works closely with Anthropic (best agentic loop and tool calling), OpenAI (GPT-5 catching up), and Google (Flash family 'amazing on price-performance'), with Masad also praising Kimi as roughly three months behind Anthropic's January generation.
- Replit is considering investing in its own customers in exchange for equity; Stripe-integrated transactions are growing triple digits month over month, and one customer, Magic School, made $20 million in its first year.
Why it matters: Replit's claim of gross-margin-positive economics while building on top of foundation models positions it as a rare independent counterpoint to the consolidation wave driving Cursor toward SpaceX, with Masad's willingness to escalate the Apple fight adding a second front of legal risk to the company's bet on non-technical enterprise builders.
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