Boss of San Francisco-based AI coding startup mocks “monoculture” Silicon Valley, as opens London office

Replit has put down a flag in London. The San Francisco-based AI coding startup opened its first overseas office in the city yesterday and said it could grow the local team to 100 people by early next year, depending on AI adoption. For now, it has around 20 staff in London, hired over just a few weeks, and plans to use the office as the centre of its European operations.

The company is leaning hard into the city’s pull. At the launch event for its European hub, co-founder and CEO Amjad Masad praised London’s diversity and lightly jabbed at Silicon Valley’s “monoculture.” He said that in San Francisco everyone speaks the same language and tech is never far away, while in London he meets artists, financiers and filmmakers as well. London mayor Sadiq Khan also spoke at the event.

Replit is not arriving alone. It joins a cluster of US tech companies in King’s Cross, alongside names such as OpenAI and Anthropic, with several other US startups nearby. The area also sits close to Isomorphic Labs, Meta and Wayve, which gives the neighbourhood a very particular sort of gravity.

Masad tied the London move to a wider view of how AI should be built. He said government should keep the field level and avoid a repeat of the last generation of platforms, where just a few companies controlled everything. Replit, he said, wants open source AI and accessible AI. The company, founded 10 years ago, says it has more than 60 million users worldwide, reaches users at 85% of the Fortune 500, and counts PwC, Ernst & Young and Mercedes-Benz among its enterprise customers. It also raised $400 million in March at a $9 billion valuation, in a round that included Databricks Ventures, Okta Ventures, Shaquille O’Neal, Y Combinator and others. It plans offices in Tokyo and New York too.