North America
Replit Raises $400M to Let Anyone Build Apps Without Coding, with Support from Qatar Investment Authority
Replit secures $400 million for its aggressive global AI expansion plans, driven by enterprise demand.
Replit, a San Francisco-based AI software development platform, has achieved a significant milestone by raising $400 million in its Series D funding round.
This substantial investment has resulted in the company’s valuation skyrocketing to $9 billion, a threefold increase in just six months. The round was led by the Canadian venture firm Georgian, with notable participation from the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), highlighting a growing enterprise demand for AI-assisted coding solutions.
With a user base exceeding 50 million globally, Replit serves numerous Fortune 500 companies, facilitating the development of production software by non-technical staff.
Corporations like Zillow, which has deployed around 600 Replit seats to build over 7,000 applications in the past year, exemplify this trend. High-profile clients such as PayPal, Adobe, and Databricks have also entered into significant enterprise agreements with the platform.
Strategic Growth and Revenue Targets
Replit is ambitiously targeting $1 billion in annual run-rate revenue by the end of 2026. This goal signifies a ten-fold increase from the beginning of its Series C calculations projected in Spring 2025. The lead investor, Georgian, emphasizes Replit’s exceptional user adoption rate, placing it among top-performing AI companies worldwide.
QIA’s investment aligns with its strategy of supporting high-growth AI infrastructure firms, deepening Replit’s ties in the Middle East. The funding round also saw participation from prominent venture capitalists including Andreessen Horowitz and Coatue, alongside strategic investments from Accenture Ventures, Databricks Ventures, and Okta Ventures.
These funds will bolster Replit’s infrastructure and market strategies in Europe, Asia, and particularly the Middle East, where an active partnership with Saudi Arabia’s national AI company, HUMAIN, is already underway.
Founded by Jordanian-born entrepreneur Amjad Masad, Replit leverages his background and expertise in technology. Learning to code at a young age, Masad has successfully built a platform that transcends traditional coding into an intuitive, user-friendly environment, enabling broader access to software development.
Introducing Agent 4
Coinciding with this funding milestone, Replit has unveiled Agent 4, a powerful new update to its platform. This version promises enhancements such as ten times faster operation and a digital canvas for collaborative design.
Its parallel agents can perform simultaneous front-end and back-end tasks, supporting the creation of diverse applications ranging from data tools to animations.
Notably, Replit’s platform remains model-agnostic, dynamically adapting to utilize the most efficient open-source or frontier models and maintaining flexibility against competitors like Anthropic’s Claude Code and Cursor.
Replit, established in 2016 by Masad, aims to make coding universally accessible through its AI-powered platform. By integrating a collaborative cloud-based development environment with AI agents, it empowers both technical and non-technical users to build, deploy, and expand software applications directly from their browsers.
North America
US-Based Startup EliseAI in Talks to Raise $300M at $3.7B Valuation to Expand AI-powered Business Automation Solutions
Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners are reportedly discussing leading the deal, which would increase EliseAI’s valuation by 68%.
AI-powered business automation company EliseAI is reportedly in discussions to raise $300 million in a new funding round at a $3.7 billion valuation.
Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners are said to be in talks to lead the financing. The transaction has not been finalised, and its terms could still change.
If completed at the reported valuation, the deal would represent a 68% increase from EliseAI’s previous round. The company raised $250 million at a $2.2 billion valuation in August 2025.
Automating Real Estate Operations
EliseAI develops AI assistants that automate communications and administrative work for property and housing management companies.
Its technology handles tasks such as scheduling apartment tours and recording tenant maintenance requests across text messages, email and phone calls. By automating repetitive interactions, the platform allows property management teams to dedicate more time to complex responsibilities and resident services.
The company competes with established property management software providers such as Yardi and RealPage. Rather than building a broader model around property ownership, EliseAI focuses on the automation layer supporting leasing, maintenance and renewals.
This targeted approach gives the company a defined position within a property management software market projected to reach nearly $10 billion by 2031.
Expanding the Platform Into Healthcare
After establishing its technology in real estate, EliseAI expanded into healthcare administration.
The company now applies the same underlying AI to patient appointments, invoices and other front-desk processes. The move demonstrates how its automation platform can address similar operational bottlenecks across industries where employees manage large volumes of routine customer or patient interactions.
Founded in 2017 by Minna Song and Tony Stoyanov, EliseAI grew out of Song’s experience as an administrative assistant. Her exposure to the repetitive questions handled by leasing teams helped shape the company’s original product.
Song and Stoyanov met while studying as undergraduates at Cambridge before launching the business.
Revenue and Workforce Growth
EliseAI surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in early 2025 and has more than doubled its workforce since 2024.
Its earlier financing included a Series D round that established the company as a unicorn and provided capital for further expansion. The proposed new transaction would give EliseAI additional resources as it develops its automation products across real estate and healthcare.
The reported talks also reflect continued investor interest in AI companies applying automation to established industries with clearly defined operational needs.
However, the financing remains under discussion. Until the round closes, the proposed $300 million raise, participating investors and $3.7 billion valuation should be treated as preliminary.
North America
US-Based Cloud Startup Blacksmith Raises $45M Series B at $550M Valuation to Scale AI Code Validation Platform
The Y Combinator-backed startup will expand computing capacity as AI coding agents generate more software that needs to be built, tested and reviewed.
US cloud infrastructure startup Blacksmith has raised $45 million in a Series B funding round led by Peak XV Partners, valuing the company at $550 million as AI-generated code creates growing demand for software validation infrastructure.
Existing investors Y Combinator and GV also participated in the round, which closed in March 2026 and was publicly announced on August 12. The financing brings Blacksmith’s total funding to $58.5 million, following a $3.5 million seed round and a $10 million Series A.
The company is scaling at a time when AI coding tools are accelerating software development but also increasing the volume of code that engineering teams must test and review before release.
AI Coding Creates a New Infrastructure Bottleneck
Blacksmith said continuous integration, or CI, jobs running on its platform have grown between 5% and 10% each week since the beginning of 2026.
CI systems automatically build and test software changes, allowing developers to identify problems before new code is merged or released.
More than 6,000 companies now use Blacksmith, including Supabase, Clerk, Ashby and Mercury. That represents a sharp increase from roughly 800 organizations when the company announced its Series A in September 2025.
Blacksmith attributes part of that growth to the adoption of coding agents such as Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. As engineering teams use AI to produce more code and open more pull requests, the company sees validation becoming an increasingly important part of the development process.
Co-founder and CEO Aditya “JP” Jayaprakash said AI has made writing code considerably easier without creating the same improvement in validation.
Engineering teams adopting coding agents are generating several times more pull requests, he said, turning CI into a potential bottleneck because every piece of AI-generated code still needs to be built, tested and reviewed before deployment.
Building Infrastructure for Continuous Integration
Founded in 2024 by Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru, Blacksmith participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch.
The startup initially focused on infrastructure for GitHub Actions workloads, which developers use to automate software builds, testing and other development processes.
Blacksmith operates computing infrastructure specifically designed for CI workloads, combining dedicated computing resources with caching and storage systems intended to accelerate testing.
The company says developers can migrate existing GitHub Actions workflows to Blacksmith by changing a single line in a workflow file.
It also claims its hardware runs twice as fast while its service costs 60% less than GitHub-hosted runners, based on Blacksmith’s own comparisons.
Expanding into AI-Assisted Software Development
Blacksmith has expanded beyond CI infrastructure with Codesmith, a cloud-based coding agent that developers can use to delegate software development tasks.
The company says Codesmith can build features and fix bugs while operating within the broader software validation workflow.
Its Autofix feature monitors pull requests for failed CI checks and review feedback. When it detects an issue, the system can attempt to diagnose the problem, generate a fix and commit the resulting change.
Blacksmith is also developing Codesmith QA, which is designed to autonomously test software changes before they are merged.
Most of the Series B capital will go toward expanding the infrastructure required to support that growth. Blacksmith currently manages hundreds of thousands of computing cores and plans to increase capacity by approximately tenfold in the coming months.
The expansion reflects the company’s broader bet that as AI agents take on a larger share of software creation, the infrastructure responsible for validating their output will become an increasingly critical part of the development stack.
North America
U.S.-Based FinTech Company Yellow Card Raises $40M to Expand Stablecoin Payment Infrastructure Across Global Markets
The strategic funding brings Yellow Card’s total equity financing to more than $120 million and will support the expansion of its Global USD Accounts and stablecoin payment rails.
Yellow Card, a US-based stablecoin infrastructure company focused on Africa and other emerging markets, has raised $40 million in strategic funding from SC Ventures, Sony Innovation Fund, Polychain Capital, Blockchain Capital, and other strategic investors.
The latest investment brings Yellow Card’s total equity financing to more than $120 million. The company will use the capital to scale its Global USD Accounts, expand its stablecoin payment infrastructure, and deepen its presence across Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
Scaling Global USD Accounts
Yellow Card’s Global USD Accounts provide businesses with a single platform for managing US dollars, holding and swapping stablecoins, managing treasury operations, and collecting or disbursing local currencies through domestic payment networks.
The company currently supports local payment rails across more than 50 countries, enabling businesses operating across multiple markets to manage cross-border financial operations through a unified infrastructure.
Yellow Card said the new funding will allow it to bring Global USD Accounts to more businesses while expanding local payment rails and currency coverage globally. Customers using its infrastructure include Visa and Western Union.
Connecting Banks to Stablecoin Infrastructure
Yellow Card is increasingly positioning itself as an infrastructure provider connecting traditional financial institutions and global businesses with stablecoin-based payment networks.
Chris Maurice, CEO and Co-Founder of Yellow Card, said the investment reflects confidence in the infrastructure the company has developed to help businesses move money without relying entirely on traditional correspondent banking networks.
Maurice added that connecting banks directly to stablecoin infrastructure represents a significant opportunity, potentially improving access to US dollars for businesses underserved by traditional cross-border banking systems.
From Africa to Global Markets
Founded by Chris Maurice and Justin Poiroux, Yellow Card was created to make cross-border money movement more affordable and efficient, particularly in emerging markets.
The company has grown into one of Africa’s largest stablecoin on- and off-ramp infrastructure providers and now employs more than 200 people across 20 countries.
Yellow Card holds licences, authorisations, or registrations across 22 jurisdictions in North America, Europe, and Africa. It has facilitated more than $10 billion in transactions, supports over 50 currencies, and has partnerships spanning Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Coinbase.
Expanding Beyond Africa
Although Yellow Card built its business around African and emerging markets, the company is now accelerating its international expansion, particularly across Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
The new capital will support the development of additional domestic payment connections and currency coverage, strengthening the infrastructure that links its Global USD Accounts with markets worldwide.
Alex Manson, CEO of SC Ventures, said stablecoin adoption will increasingly depend on reliable infrastructure and practical applications, highlighting Yellow Card’s role in enabling businesses across Africa to move value efficiently between markets.
Building Global Stablecoin Payment Rails
Yellow Card has gradually shifted its business model from primarily providing retail cryptocurrency access toward serving businesses and financial institutions.
The transition became increasingly visible around its $33 million Series C round in 2024, as the company focused on larger and more consistent transaction volumes generated by corporate customers.
With more than $120 million in total equity financing, Yellow Card aims to become an infrastructure layer connecting banks and businesses to stablecoin payment rails, supporting faster cross-border transactions and expanding access to dollar-based financial services across emerging and global markets.
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