The $3 billion developer AI startup Replit is riding the boom in vibe coding — and it has ambitious projections to match.
The Silicon Valley startup, which builds technology to help people build apps and websites with AI, expects to surpass $1 billion in revenue by next year, its CEO and founder Amjad Masad told Business Insider. That's about four times as much as the $240 million in annual sales that Replit is now generating, Masad added.
Masad disclosed the updated projections after Business Insider obtained a leaked memo for investors from this summer, showing it projected $1 billion by the end of 2027.
Replit and other vibe coding startups are experiencing exploding growth. Replit's revenue stood at just $2.8 million last year, until the launch of an AI coding agent supercharged sales. It said it surpassed $150 million in annualized revenue in September, when the startup announced it raised $250 million at a $3 billion valuation.
Masad, who aims to onboard 1 billion developers on Replit, says the projections and latest revenues — which haven't been reported — are partly thanks to surging adoption from businesses like Duolingo and Zillow.
"Replit is kind of replacing a lot of the no-code, low-code tools, which really never worked very well. They get initial productivity boosts, but a lot of times that ended up actually slowing down a lot of companies," Masad told Business Insider.
Making money from most of Replit's users — and doing so profitably — is another thing. The document being passed around by Replit's investors shows the startup has over 150,000 paying users as of June 2025, in numbers that are also previously unreported — a small fraction of its total 40 million-strong user base.
In the memo, Replit says it has tripled its average revenue per user over the past year thanks to strong business sales. The memo mentions profit margin pressures as a temporary risk, saying that as tech giants continue to drive down the cost of AI, Replit's costs will fall too.
Replit had gross margins around 23% in July, lower than those of other AI startups, The Information reported in August. Masad said those numbers were "not far off" and are improving. He added that margins for business from enterprises are far healthier at around 80%.
"The margins we get from enterprise is just way better, so we're trying to get to a point where we're even making it more affordable for consumers," he said.
Replit's ambitious target signals how software startups are increasingly turning to AI first, gradually displacing giants like Amazon Web Services. More startups and coders than ever are building first on AI products such as Replit, Vercel, and OpenAI, only turning to traditional cloud providers later.
Replit isn't the only AI coding startup experiencing major growth. Cursor, for example, said this summer that it quintupled its annual recurring revenue to $500 million in less than six months.
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