While AI coding startups like Cursor close brow-raising rounds on barely three years of existence, Replit’s path to a $3 billion valuation has been anything but swift. For CEO Amjad Masad, who’s been building tools to democratize programming since 2009, it’s a story of persistence through multiple failed pivots, years stuck at the same revenue plateau, and a near-death moment that forced him to cut half his staff.

That makes what happened next all the more remarkable. Earlier this month, the Bay Area-based company closed a $250 million funding round led by Prysm Capital, nearly tripling its valuation from 2023. The raise came on the heels of unprecedented revenue growth for the company — from $2.8 million last year to $150 million in annualized revenue in less than a year. But for Masad, this moment represents something more than a startup catching fire. It’s the culmination of a 16-year obsession.

“Our mission has always been the same,” Masad told me on the newest episode of TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC Download podcast. “Initially, we said we want to make programming more accessible, and then we sort of upped the ante a little bit. We said we’re going to create a billion programmers.”

It’s purposely audacious – what a headline! – but it’s also something that Masad, a Palestinian-Jordanian, has been working toward for his entire career. As he tells it, he came to the United States in 2012 after his open-source coding project began gaining attention – including catching the eye of the New York Times.