Posted December 5, 2023 by bfirsh To cut to the chase: we’ve raised a $40 million Series B led by a16z. Let me explain why.
Last year, Stable Diffusion was released. It was an open-source image generation model that caught the imagination of tinkerers. An explosion of forks were created: inpainting, animation, texture generation, fine-tunes.
At the start, it felt like a toy. It was just people tinkering around and seeing what was possible.
But soon, side projects started to turn into real products. Indie hackers like Pieter Levels and Danny Postma made apps that generate profile pictures, redecorate your house, and create professional headshots. They’re now real businesses making over $1 million annual revenue as solo developers.
The growth in tinkering and building since then has been astonishing. In the last year and a half, 2 million people have signed up to Replicate, and 30,000 of them are paying customers. We’ve seen people build autonomous robots, real-time drawing apps, and language model command-line interfaces.
