What we build

Every company should answer three questions: Why now? Why us? Why haven’t the incumbents won?

Intelligence is becoming cheap and widely available. Agents represent a new computing model—software that can reason, execute work, and operate in parallel on a massive scale.

The old barriers to starting a company—capital, labor, and specialized knowledge—are falling away. More people can build what they imagine, faster. We think that will create a generational renaissance in entrepreneurship and fundamentally empower individuals to bring new products and services to the world.

Software for selling stuff online is already easy to use. Amazon, Etsy, and Shopify exist at the fingertips of millions of people. Launching a website, opening a bank account, and accepting payments can now be done in minutes from your phone.

Yet the number of businesses that succeed remains low.

Starting and growing a business still takes enormous amounts of time, money, and specialized knowledge. Not only are there a million things to do, but each one requires expertise and experience. Launching a website feels monumental. In practice, it is only the beginning. What follows are late nights spent designing the website, making ad creative, writing copy, managing inventory, packing boxes, closing deals, answering customers, and doing the accounting.

The last Internet era built tools. Shopify helped you launch. Klaviyo helped you reach customers. Stripe helped you charge them.

The AI era is different. You don’t want tools; you want outcomes. Not a website, but sales. Not another email tool, but customers who come back.

Replo automates this across tens of thousands of businesses. Our agents monitor performance, identify what needs attention, and execute coordinated work across your storefront, marketing, inventory, and P&Ls. They don’t just tell you what to do. They do the work for you.

Software is getting cheaper to build. Features are getting cheaper to copy. The products that endure are the ones where data, workflows, and institutional memory compound over time.

Replo participates in every transaction on our platform. Our revenue is tied to the value merchants create, rather than the number of tokens consumed. When we help merchants create demand, convert customers, and process sales, we share in that value and reinvest it into doing more work for them.

That gives us fundamentally different unit economics. AI companies that mark up inference make more money when their customers consume more tokens. We make more money when our merchants make more money. Our bet is that by maximizing the value created by every dollar of inference, every successful transaction gives us more capacity to make the system better.

Whether we are right about what the next few years will bring remains to be seen, but we hope you will join us along the way.

There are three possible scenarios for Replo’s demise.

The first is that the problem we’re solving doesn’t exist. While I think the probability of this is low for all the reasons above, our response to it is entirely within our control. If we fail to adapt and build something someone wants, that failure is entirely on us.

The second is that another startup comes along and does what we do better than we do. I believe that all startups are built on a secret, and our open secret is that commerce is very poorly understood. Most folks in Silicon Valley think it’s a couple of lines of code integrating with Stripe. When you buy something on Amazon, there is a deep, deep bench of knowledge—from advertising and marketing know-how to credit card routing and logistics—behind each decision.

The third is that a larger incumbent with stronger network effects does what we do. This is the familiar question: “Why doesn’t Google just do this?”

The cost of building software is rapidly approaching zero. In the last generation, companies needed to raise an enormous amount of capital to hire product builders. Mundane, stupid features at scale often took hundreds, if not thousands, of people to build.

To shortcut this, companies like Salesforce, Etsy, and Square built massive ecosystems of partnerships and bundled products together to go to market. On one hand, the advantages of these network effects are obvious. On the other hand, they prevent companies from innovating in areas from which they already benefit.

A large company is not run by a god-king. It is run by hundreds of product managers, sales leaders, and investors with different incentives. A new revenue stream that could transform Replo may be irrelevant—or threatening—to an incumbent. OpenAI, for example, would never launch its own social shopping app if it jeopardized its partnership with TikTok.

We’re willing to go all-in and accept higher risk in exchange for higher reward.