Replit’s Amjad Masad on the Cursor deal, fighting Apple, and why he’d rather not sell

At TechCrunch's StrictlyVC event, Replit CEO Amjad Masad shared that the company's revenue surged from $2.8 million in all of 2024 to tracking toward a billion-dollar annual run rate, with net revenue retention hitting 300%. Contrasting with rival Cursor, which reportedly operates at negative 23% gross margins and is in talks for a $60 billion SpaceX acquisition, Masad emphasized Replit's sustainable economics. Replit has been gross margin positive for over a year, partly by focusing on non-technical users who need a full-stack platform from prompt to deployed, scalable application. While Masad acknowledged his fiduciary duty to consider offers, he expressed a strong preference to remain independent, noting Replit's decade-long history and the potential to further democratize software creation.

On the AI model front, Masad ranked Anthropic as "still undefeated" for the core agentic loop, with superior tool calling and coherence. GPT-5 is catching up quickly, while Google's Flash family leads on price-performance, beating open-source options. Replit uses models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, but Masad also praised newer labs like Reflection AI and Chinese models such as Kimi, which are only about three months behind. Masad's insights underscore a competitive landscape where model choice depends on task-specific needs, and Replit's platform approach allows it to leverage the best models while maintaining control over its destiny.