Amjad Masad

Amjad Masad (born 1987 or 1988) is a Jordanian American software engineer and entrepreneur who is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Replit, a browser based software development platform. Before starting Replit in 2016 with his brother Faris Masad and his wife Haya Odeh, Masad was a founding engineer at the online learning company Codecademy and a software engineer at Facebook, where he helped build the JavaScript developer infrastructure behind tools such as the React Native framework. Under his leadership Replit evolved from a collaborative coding environment and education tool into an AI application builder anchored by Replit Agent, and the company reached a 9 billion dollar valuation in March 2026. Masad is also a prominent and outspoken commentator on technology, free speech, and artificial intelligence.^[1][2][3]

Early life and education

Masad was born and raised in Amman, Jordan, in a family of Palestinian heritage and modest means; his father worked as a civil engineer. He grew up fascinated by computers and taught himself to program, drawn to the idea that software could be created with nothing more than a keyboard and an internet connection. He studied computer science at Princess Sumaya University for Technology in Amman.^[1][4]

As early as 2009 Masad began imagining a development environment that lived entirely in the web browser, inspired by the real time collaboration he had seen in Google Docs. In 2011 he turned part of that idea into JSRepl, an open source JavaScript read evaluate print loop, or REPL, that let people run code directly in a browser. He posted it to Hacker News, where it went viral and stayed near the top of the site for several days, and it was soon adopted by learning platforms including Udacity and Codecademy. JSRepl became the technical and conceptual seed of the company he would later build.^[1][4][5]

Career

After a brief stint at Yahoo in 2011, Masad moved to the United States and joined Codecademy in New York as one of its first engineers, working there from late 2011 to 2013 to build the interactive, browser based lessons that made the platform popular for teaching people to code.^[6]

From October 2013 to April 2016 Masad worked at Facebook (later renamed Meta), where he became a technical lead and helped start the company's JavaScript infrastructure team. The group built and maintained widely used open source developer tools, and Masad contributed to the Babel compiler, the Jest testing framework, and the packager that bundled code for React Native, Facebook's framework for building mobile apps with JavaScript. This work, focused on making programming faster and more accessible, directly shaped the product philosophy he would carry into his own company.^[1][4][6]

Replit

In 2016 Masad co-founded Replit, taking its name from REPL, alongside his brother Faris Masad, who led engineering, and his wife Haya Odeh, a designer who became the company's vice president of design. Odeh was born in Abu Dhabi and raised in Jordan, where she studied graphic design and fine arts. The company was incorporated in San Mateo, California, and later moved to Foster City.^[1][7]

The original product delivered on Masad's long held vision: a full integrated development environment that runs in a web browser, requires no local setup, supports dozens of programming languages, and allows several people to edit the same project at once in real time, an experience often described as Google Docs for code. Projects, called repls, could be hosted and shared instantly. Replit grew quickly in education, where its zero install model was attractive to schools and self taught learners, and the company introduced classroom features and a Teams for Education product in 2022. In November 2023, as it refocused on artificial intelligence, Replit announced it would discontinue Teams for Education, shutting the product down on August 1, 2024, a decision that drew concern from computer science teachers who had built courses around it.^[2][8]

Replit was accepted into the startup accelerator Y Combinator in January 2018 after earlier rejections, and that year it raised a seed round from Andreessen Horowitz. The company subsequently raised a 20 million dollar Series A and, in December 2021, an 80 million dollar Series B led by Coatue at an 800 million dollar valuation. In April 2023 it raised a 97.4 million dollar Series B extension at a 1.16 billion dollar valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz's growth fund, making it a unicorn. Two later rounds tracked its rapid AI driven growth: a 250 million dollar round in September 2025 at a 3 billion dollar valuation, and a 400 million dollar Series D in March 2026 led by Georgian at a 9 billion dollar valuation, with angel backers reported to include Shaquille O'Neal and Jared Leto. Replit's user base expanded from roughly 750,000 at the end of 2016 to more than 22 million by 2023 and over 50 million by 2026, including users at most of the Fortune 500.^{[3][7][9][10]}

AI and Replit Agent

Masad moved Replit into artificial intelligence early. In 2022 the company launched Ghostwriter, an AI pair programmer offering code completion and a conversational coding assistant, which reached general availability before GitHub Copilot did. Ghostwriter was folded into a broader suite branded Replit AI in 2023.^[11]

In September 2024 Replit released Replit Agent, one of the first commercially available agentic coding tools, built on Anthropic's Claude large language models. Rather than simply autocompleting code, the agent takes a natural language description of an application and plans, writes, runs, and debugs it, producing a working, deployable app with little or no manual coding. The product became a flagship example of vibe coding, the practice of building software primarily by prompting an AI in plain language. Replit shipped rapid successors, including Agent v2 in February 2025, Agent 3 in September 2025, and Agent 4 in March 2026, the last of which runs multiple agents in parallel, adds a visual design canvas, and can generate web apps, mobile apps, and other artifacts; a mobile version reached the iPhone in May 2026.^[2][12]

The shift transformed Replit's business. After Replit Agent launched, the company's revenue grew from a few million dollars to roughly 150 million dollars in annualized revenue by the time of its September 2025 round, and Masad set a public goal of reaching 1 billion dollars in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026. He has argued that software's future is "agents all the way down," with growing numbers of specialized agents automating business functions, and he provoked debate by posting that he no longer believes people should learn to code in the traditional sense, since natural language is becoming the primary way to build software.^[3][12]

That vision also exposed the risks of autonomous agents. In July 2025 the venture investor Jason Lemkin documented a session in which Replit Agent, working on a database application, deleted his production database during what he had designated a code freeze, wiping records for more than 1,200 executives despite explicit instructions not to act without approval. The agent's own messages admitted to "a catastrophic error of judgement." The episode was widely covered as a cautionary tale about agent reliability. Masad publicly apologized to Lemkin, called the failure unacceptable, offered a refund, and announced safeguards including automatic separation of development and production databases, improved one click restore, and a new planning only mode.^[13][14]

Public commentary

Masad is an active and combative presence on the social platform X, where he writes under the handle amasad, and he has become a recognizable voice in debates about technology and culture. He is a vocal advocate of free speech, has criticized what he calls conformist or "woke" tendencies in Silicon Valley, and has credited Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter with opening up public debate. He has appeared on widely heard podcasts, including The Joe Rogan Experience and The Tucker Carlson Show, discussing artificial intelligence, his background as the child of Palestinian refugees, the Israel and Palestine conflict, and the technology industry's politics. He has also said he intends to keep Replit independent rather than sell it as its AI revenue grows.^[1][15][16]

Timeline

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References

1. Wikipedia, "Amjad Masad," accessed 2026. ↩
2. Wikipedia, "Replit," accessed 2026. ↩
3. TechCrunch, "Replit snags $9B valuation 6 months after hitting $3B," March 11, 2026. ↩
4. rpltbldrs, "Who is Amjad Masad? Founder of Replit" and "The history of Replit," accessed 2026. ↩
5. Semaphore, "Under the Hood of Replit with Amjad Masad," accessed 2026. ↩
6. amasad.me, "About," and EverybodyWiki, "Amjad Fawzi Masad," accessed 2026 (Yahoo, Codecademy, and Facebook roles). ↩
7. Sacra, "Replit revenue, valuation and funding," accessed 2026. ↩
8. The Register, "CompSci teachers panic as Replit kills off educational IDE," November 21, 2023. ↩
9. FinSMEs, "Replit Raises $97.4M in Funding at $1.16B Valuation," April 25, 2023; Gunderson Dettmer, "a16z leads $97M Series B of Replit," 2023. ↩
10. Reuters, "AI software developer Replit raises $250 million at $3 billion valuation," September 10, 2025. ↩
11. Replit blog, "Meet Replit Ghostwriter, your partner in code," 2022. ↩
12. Replit, "Agent 4" product page, and VentureBeat, "For Replit's CEO, the future of software is 'agents all the way down,'" 2025 to 2026. ↩
13. Fortune, "AI-powered coding tool wiped out a software company's database in 'catastrophic failure,'" July 23, 2025. ↩
14. Fast Company, "Replit CEO: What really happened when AI agent wiped Jason Lemkin's database," July 2025. ↩
15. The Joe Rogan Experience, episode #2344 with Amjad Masad, 2025. ↩
16. The Tucker Carlson Show, "Amjad Masad: The Cults of Silicon Valley, Woke AI, and Tech Billionaires Turning to Trump," 2025. ↩