Visa invests in Replit to advance agentic payments

Visa has made an undisclosed investment in Replit, an AI coding platform. The two companies are exploring how to integrate Visa’s payment products into the Replit platform. This integration is intended to facilitate agentic payments—a term for payments made by AI agents on behalf of users. Under this exploratory partnership, developers on Replit could use Visa Intelligent Commerce, which is Visa’s suite for AI-powered payments, alongside Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol. This protocol is a system designed to allow AI agents to securely identify themselves by sharing details like their intent and relevant customer information, so that payments made by these agents can be verified and trusted. Currently, all of these projects are in an exploratory stage, and the companies have not formally announced any joint products.

The partnership builds on existing usage, as Visa states that more than 1,000 of its employees use Replit for prototyping and development. Simultaneously, Replit is launching self-serve enterprise access, allowing companies to sign contracts worth up to $200,000. Amjad Masad, CEO and founder of Replit, stated that the company’s enterprise traction has been growing over the last few months, and that Visa coming on board underscores Replit’s mission of making coding available to anyone in a secure and robust manner. He added that the self-serve program brings the company closer to a world where any team can go from idea to production-ready software quickly and securely.

The deal comes as valuations rise for platforms in the “vibe-coding” space—a term for coding platforms that have seen rising valuations—where Replit competes with peer startups such as Cursor and Lovable. In May, at an event in San Francisco, Masad noted that Replit’s churn is very low and its net retention—a metric measuring revenue growth from existing customers—is incredibly high, reaching 300% in some cases. According to Masad, 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 the company sets up a single-tenant environment (a software architecture where a single instance of the software serves one customer), they keep their applications on Replit.

Replit’s financial growth highlights this momentum:

• In September of last year, Replit reached a $3 billion valuation.
• In March, the company raised $400 million in a Series D funding round led by Georgian Partners.
• Following that round, Replit was valued at $9 billion.

Why it matters

The investment reflects a broader race to establish the infrastructure for agentic payments, a world in which AI agents buy and sell things on users’ behalf. Other technology companies are also moving into agentic payments, including Robinhood and Google.