Visa invests in Replit to enable agentic payments for AI-built apps and developer platforms

Visa invests in Replit to power agentic payments for developers

Visa has announced an undisclosed investment in AI coding platform Replit. The two companies are also exploring how to integrate Visa's payment products into Replit, so that developers -- and the AI agents they build -- can accept payments directly from customers without leaving the platform. Visa added that more than 1,000 of its employees have been using Replit for prototyping and development. As part of the partnership, the companies are exploring how developers on Replit can use Visa's suite for AI-powered payments, called Visa Intelligent Commerce, as well as Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol -- a system that allows AI agents to securely identify themselves by sharing information like their intent and relevant customer details, so that payments made by agents can be verified and trusted. All of these projects are in an exploratory stage, and the companies haven't formally announced any joint products. The investment reflects a broader race to establish the infrastructure for so-called agentic payments -- a world in which AI agents buy and sell things on users' behalf. Besides Replit and Visa, other tech companies are also moving quickly in this space. Retail investing platform Robinhood now wants people to use agents to trade, while Google wants users to deploy agents for shopping. "Over the last few months, our enterprise traction has been growing, and Visa coming on board underscores our mission of making coding available to anyone in a secure and robust manner," Amjad Masad, CEO and founder of Replit, said in a statement. Replit is also launching self-serve enterprise access, allowing companies to sign contracts worth up to $200,000 without talking to a salesperson. The tier offers enterprise-grade compliance and controls, including SSO -- single sign-on, a system that lets employees access multiple tools with one set of credentials -- audit logs, and advanced permissions. "Our continued customer and partner additions in the enterprise, coupled with our new self-serve program, bring us closer to a world where any team can go from idea to production-ready software quickly and securely," Masad added. As demand for so-called vibe-coding platforms has shot up, valuations of startups like Replit, Cursor, and Lovable have risen rapidly, along with investor interest. In September of last year, Replit hit the $3 billion valuation mark. Six months later, in March, the company raised $400 million in a Series D led by Georgian Partners at a $9 billion valuation -- tripling its valuation in under six months. In May at TechCrunch's StrictlyVC event in San Francisco, Masad said that Replit's churn is very low, and customers are sticking around. "Churn is very, very low, and net retention is incredibly high -- 300% in some cases. What we actually hear from customers is that when engineers get nervous and try to rebuild an app into their own stack, they often make it worse. Once enterprises get comfortable with the full Replit stack -- especially when we set up a single-tenant environment for them -- they keep the apps on Replit," he said.

Monetizing a Vibe-Coded Website Is 'Very Risky.' So Replit Is Making It Easier With a Major Partnership

Vibe coding has given people of all skill levels the ability to make websites and apps. Now, one of the pioneers behind the technology has announced a major collaboration aimed at simplifying the process of monetizing those creations. Replit, a popular vibe coding platform, is partnering with Visa to bring agentic commerce to AI-created software and is expanding its enterprise offerings with a new "self-serve" option. In a press release, Replit and Visa said that they would work together to integrate Visa Intelligent Commerce, described as the financial company's "portfolio of initiatives designed to enable secure, AI-driven commerce experiences at scale," into the platform. They also announced that Visa has made an investment in the Amjad Masad-led company, though Visa declined to comment on the size of the investment. Michele Catasta, Replit president and head of AI, says that the company has successfully empowered people of all skill levels to create software, and "the next natural step" is to make it easier for people to monetize their work. According to Catasta, monetizing vibe-coded websites and applications can be "contrived and very risky," which is why the company is partnering with Visa. Catsta says Visa's expertise will make it easier for users to set up working payment methods for their ecommerce platforms or SaaS applications.