Replit, a San Francisco-based startup that offers a web-based IDE for software development, has raised nearly $100 million in a Series B extension round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company’s post-money valuation now stands at $1.16 billion. Replit’s online, collaborative IDE supports a range of programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, Go, and C++. Its headline feature is Ghostwriter, a suite of features powered by an AI model trained on publicly available code. Ghostwriter can make suggestions and explain code, considering what users type and other context from their accounts, like the programming languages they’re using. Replit’s explosive growth, leading to a partnership with Google Cloud and a user base eclipsing 22 million developers, is attributed to Ghostwriter. However, like all generative AI tools, it comes with risks and potentially legal consequences that have yet to fully play out in the courts. Liability aside, some legal experts have suggested that AI like Ghostwriter could put companies at risk if they were to unwittingly incorporate copyrighted suggestions from the tool into their production software. According to a recent study out of Stanford, software engineers who use code-generating AI systems are more likely to cause security vulnerabilities in the apps they develop. Replit has its work cut out for it.
