Replicas raised a $4M seed round.
I wanted to use this opportunity to reflect on the initial vision for Replicas and how its differed (and not changed at all) since.
In early-mid 2025 it was considered avant garde to do all of your code from coding agents in the terminal. Even the best engineers feared their lack of control over agents would, inevitably, introduce critical mistakes only avoided by reading the code. But then, in just roughly six months, all the engineers I knew went from 1 Claude Code terminal, to running 3-5 agents.
The world has changed since then. Agents have made a critical leap not necessarily just in coding 'ability', but also an ability to use a computer. One aspect that humans were better at wasn't code accuracy (in fact, LLMs are probably better at that now), but the skills to verify our work.
By December 2025, and then March 2026 (when we started YC), coding agents could verify their own work end to end, like a human engineer. They could open the app, click through it, run the tests, and own the whole path from code to PR to deploy.
So engineers kept moving up a level. Agents in an IDE, then agents with us reading every line, then several agents while we skimmed their changes. Today a lot of great engineers barely read the code, because agents are that good when they have the right tooling: a machine with the right dependencies, a browser, a test database, the same setup an engineer uses.
Once one agent can do that much, you run 5, then 10. Next year it could be hundreds per engineer. A laptop can't hold hundreds of agents that each need their own environment, so every agent needs a machine of its own, and you need one place to manage them all.
That's the thesis behind cloud agents, and why we built Replicas. I was heavily inspired by AI 2027, where an AI company runs 250,000 copies of its coding agent and keeps its human engineers to manage them.
Teams like Mintlify and Knowunity run their agents on Replicas every day. Customers crossed 1 million minutes of agent usage in May, 2 million in July, and 5 million in September. Three weeks later, they're at almost 7 million. Agents have now run in over 1 million workspaces.
Investors and the 'Manager' company
When we visited Paul Graham in Palo Alto, he insisted that we were the 'manager' company. It's a simple but effective slogan.
Ultimately, Replicas is the best, most forward-facing way to manage agents - the workhorses of the future. In the meantime, that means building infrastructure, cloud, and web apps.
We raised this round from Y Combinator, Flex Capital, Founders' Co-op, Pioneer Fund, Robinhood Ventures, Twenty Two Ventures, Metsu Capital, and Blast.
Along with angels including:
- Paul Graham (co-founder of Y Combinator)
- Kaz Nejatian (CEO of Opendoor, former COO of Shopify)
- Zeno Rocha (founder of Resend)
- Merrill Lutsky (co-founder of Graphite)
- Henri Stern (co-founder of Privy)
- Jake Heller (co-founder of Casetext)
- Eli Brown (founder of Guilded)
- Rami Essaid (founder of Finmark and Distil Networks)
- Justin Torre and Cole Gottdank (co-founders of Helicone)
- Christian Mathiesen (co-founder of Frigade)
- JJ Fliegelman (co-founder of WayUp)
- James Greenhill (one of PostHog's first engineers)
And many more.
Thank you to every team that bet on us early.
And if this sounds like a problem you want to work on, we're hiring.
Cheers,
Connor