Replit's Amjad Masad on Cursor acquisition rumors, the Apple dispute, and why he won't sell

Replit has gone from $2.8 million in annual revenue in 2024 to now heading toward a $1 billion annualized run rate. Amjad Masad emphasized that the company has maintained gross margin positive status for over a year, allowing it to stay independent unlike competitors burning through large losses.

On rumors of Cursor being acquired by SpaceX, he said AI companies building agent products on top of foundation models struggle to survive if they burn too much cash. He noted that while Replit hasn't completely ruled out potential acquisition offers, its default direction is to stay independent.

Replit's strength lies in being an end-to-end platform that lets even non-technical users build apps from just an idea. He explained that it goes from prompt to deployment, handling security, databases, and migrations all at once, and that every deployment creates a new isolated project on Google Cloud to enhance security.

He also spoke specifically about model competitiveness.

• He said Anthropic is still furthest ahead in core agentic loop and tool calling.
• He assessed that GPT-5 is catching up quickly.
• He said the Google Flash line excels in speed and price-to-performance.
• He added that Reflection AI's open-source models and China's Kimi are also worth watching.

Enterprise sales are mostly driven by an inbound flow of customers who try the product first and then reach out. This is how they landed customers like Zillow and Meta, with some cases showing 300% net revenue retention. He also mentioned a case where Bain & Company replaced Tableau and Power BI with Replit and Databricks.

Regarding the conflict with Apple, he criticized that after Replit launched its iOS app generation feature, App Store updates were blocked, and that Apple's stated reason was false. However, while saying the Replit app isn't the lifeline of the business, he stated they could fight it in court if necessary.

Finally, he said he's also considering directly investing in startups that began on top of Replit. He added that since integrating Stripe, transaction volume through Replit has shown triple-digit month-over-month growth, and a clear trend has emerged of startups growing into bigger businesses within the platform.