Replit CEO Masad says company will try to stay independent amid rival Cursor sale talks

Replit CEO Amjad Masad says the AI coding assistant company intends to remain independent, even as rival Cursor is reportedly in talks to be acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion. Masad made the comments at TechCrunch's StrictlyVC event in San Francisco. The last 18 months have dramatically changed Replit's business. The company went from $2.8 million in revenue for all of 2024 to tracking toward a billion-dollar annual run rate, Masad said. Net revenue retention is reaching as high as 300% in some cases. Masad contrasted Replit's economics with Cursor's, noting that Cursor has been operating at negative 23% gross margins while Replit has been gross margin positive for more than a year. Replit targets non-technical users and provides an end-to-end platform from prompt to deployment, Masad said. Most of Replit's sales are inbound or organic, with customers such as Zillow and Meta adopting the product before buying enterprise plans. Masad said Replit typically wins on security because it offers a full-stack environment with built-in databases that are not open to the public, unlike some competing tools. He cited Bain & Company as an example of a customer that replaced Tableau and Power BI with Replit and Databricks. The company works with model providers including Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. Masad ranked Anthropic as the leader on agentic tool calling, said GPT-5 is catching up quickly, and praised Google's Flash models on price-performance. Replit has spent four years on the Apple App Store, but updates have been blocked for months. Apple's stated reason is that Replit downloads new code to devices after approval, violating App Store guidelines. Masad called that a lie and said Replit would be willing to prove it in court. He added that losing the app would not materially affect the business. Masad also said Replit has considered investing in its own customers in exchange for equity. He cited the example of Magic School, a company started by a teacher on Replit that made $20 million in its first year. He noted that transactions flowing through Replit via a Stripe integration are growing at triple-digit month-over-month rates.