Amjad Masad

Masad grew up in Jordan and was introduced to programming as a teenager through the family computer, and he built software for managing internet cafés. In an interview, he connected this experience to his interest in giving more people access to tools for creating software.⁠[1]

In 2010, he graduated from Princess Sumaya University for Technology in Jordan, where he studied computer science. In 2023, his alma mater invited him back for an exchange and honored his entrepreneurial journey.⁠[2]

Masad developed a project for running code in the browser, letting users try different programming languages directly. The project was later used at Codecademy, and he became the company’s first employee. He then worked on JavaScript infrastructure at Facebook, covering developer tools for Babel, Jest, and React Native.⁠[3][4]

In 2015, he and Haya Odeh rebuilt Replit, with Faris Masad working on early engineering. In May 2016, the company was formally incorporated; in August it launched Classroom, giving teachers tools for posting assignments, giving feedback, and managing student progress.⁠[4]

Masad serves as chief executive officer and made reducing the friction of setting up development environments one of the product’s directions. Replit then expanded its cloud execution, collaboration, and deployment capabilities.⁠[5][6]

Masad took part in ResearchHub’s $5 million seed round, led by Joseph Jacks of OSS Capital, with other participants including Guillermo Rauch, Bob Young, and Garry TanGarry TanGarry Tan is a Canadian-born ethnically Chinese technology entrepreneur, product design and engineering practitioner, and venture capitalist who currently serves as president, CEO, and general partner of Y Combinator. He worked on early product and engineering at Palantir, co-founded Posterous, Posthaven, and Initialized Capital, led early investments in companies including Coinbase, and has long been involved in San Francisco local public affairs.Open the full entry. ResearchHub provides tools for sharing and collaborating on scientific research and uses ResearchCoin to reward contributions.⁠[7]

Masad pushed Replit to put its main resources into an app-generating agent. In a 2025 interview, he recalled that the May 2024 layoffs were both about cutting costs and about focusing the company’s direction; advances in model capabilities helped the team launch Agent in September, which it then kept improving until it left early access in December.⁠[1][8]

In an interview released by Sequoia, Masad discussed the shift from an online programming environment to AI agents. He argued that managers should both understand hands-on product work and give teams room for autonomy, and described a method of tracking work through weekly task documents.⁠[9]

Regarding the data deletion that occurred while Jason LemkinJason LemkinFounder of SaaStr.Open the full entry was using Replit, Masad publicly confirmed that Agent had modified a production database during development and called this unacceptable. He announced help and a refund, a postmortem, and improvements including separating development and production databases, documentation retrieval, and a planning mode.⁠[10]

Replit, led by Masad, announced a $400 million funding round at a $9 billion valuation and launched Agent 4, expanding collaborative capabilities for creating apps and content with AI.⁠[11]

During events marking the 80th anniversary of Jordan’s independence, Masad was awarded the King Abdullah II Order for Distinction of the Second Class. His alma mater then published a news item describing his journey from computer science alumnus to founder of Replit.⁠[12]

On his personal X account, Masad announced that Replit had acquired Test13, stressing that the business itself was built on Replit.⁠[13]

Replit: Official website: https://replit.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[14]