Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad doesn't want to sell, and he's saying it directly.
Speaking at TechCrunch's StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday, Masad was asked the question everyone in the AI developer tools market is circling right now: with rival Cursor reportedly in talks to be acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion, is Replit next?
His answer was effectively no - not by choice. He didn't rule out a sale categorically, but pushed back on the assumption that acquisition is the natural endpoint for an AI coding company. The reported Cursor deal, if it closes anywhere near that $60 billion figure, would rank among the largest AI acquisitions ever. Cursor launched publicly in 2023, which makes that valuation particularly striking for a three-year-old product.
The StrictlyVC conversation also covered Replit's ongoing disputes with Apple over its mobile coding environment. Replit lets users write and run code on an iPhone, which has put it in recurring conflict with Apple's App Store review process - sometimes allowed, sometimes pulled.
The broader market context: the AI developer tools space is consolidating fast. Microsoft owns GitHub Copilot. Google has coding assistants embedded across its development products. Independent players are getting squeezed from two directions - large tech companies bundling AI features into existing tools, and well-funded startups with deeper pockets for frontier model access.
Masad's argument for independence rests on differentiation. Replit is a full browser-based development environment, not just a code completion plugin, which puts it in a different category than Cursor. The company has been moving toward agentic features - AI that can build and deploy complete applications, not just autocomplete individual lines of code. Whether that differentiation justifies staying independent at a moment when $60 billion acquisition offers are apparently on the table for competitors is the central question Masad is answering with his position.