Endeavor Jordan has selected Amjad Masad and Haya Odeh, co-founders of AI coding platform Replit, as Endeavor Entrepreneurs, marking the organisation's first unicorn selection from Jordan and Endeavor's 100th unicorn globally.
The selection comes weeks after Replit closed a $400 million Series D at a $9 billion valuation led by Georgian, with participation from QIA, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Craft Ventures and Y Combinator, among others.
The round tripled the company's valuation in six months and made Masad a billionaire for the first time, with Forbes estimating his net worth at $2 billion. Replit now has over 40 million users and is targeting $1 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026.
Both founders are rooted in Jordan. Masad was born and raised in Amman in a family with Palestinian and Algerian heritage. His father, a civil engineer from a Palestinian refugee background, brought home an IBM PC in 1993, and by the following year a six-year-old Masad had taught himself to code, building apps to help his younger brother learn maths. He studied computer science at Princess Sumaya University for Technology before moving to the United States in 2011, arriving with roughly $100 in his pocket after airport officials in Amman, unfamiliar with the O-1 visa he had been granted, forced him to buy a return ticket with most of his cash.
In the US, Masad became the founding engineer at Codecademy before joining Facebook's JavaScript infrastructure team. The first iteration of what would become Replit, an open-source browser-based coding environment, had originated as a side project in Jordan. When he posted it on Hacker News, it went viral, with JavaScript creator Brendan Eich among those who took notice.
Odeh, Masad's wife and co-founder, was born in Abu Dhabi and raised in Jordan, where she studied graphic design and fine arts at Al-Ahliyya Amman University. She worked at design studios in Amman before moving to the US, where she freelanced for the Clinton Foundation and consultancy Organic, among others. The two officially founded Replit together in 2016 alongside Masad's brother Faris, with Odeh leading design as VP. Her background in visual communication and the relationship between design and psychology has shaped the platform's approach to making software creation intuitive for non-technical users.
The path to building Replit was not straightforward. The company was rejected by Y Combinator four times before Paul Graham, YC's co-founder, read about the project on Hacker News and encouraged the team to reapply. For eight years Replit struggled to find product-market fit, and in 2024 Masad cut half the staff. The breakthrough came with the rise of AI-powered coding: Replit launched its first AI agent in late 2024, pivoted away from professional developers toward enabling non-technical knowledge workers to build software through natural language, and saw annualised revenue surge from $2.8 million to $150 million within a year.
The company now competes with Anthropic's Claude Code, Cursor and Swedish startup Lovable in a fast-moving AI coding market. Its latest release, Agent 4, combines design and code in a single environment. Enterprise customers include Zillow, Databricks, PayPal and Adobe.
Endeavor Jordan said the selection was the result of sustained effort from its local team. The network, founded in 1997, supports high-impact entrepreneurs in over 45 markets and uses a peer-selection model in which existing Endeavor Entrepreneurs vote on new entrants.
Replit is now the highest-valued company to emerge from Jordan's tech ecosystem and one of a growing number of MENA diaspora-founded companies reaching scale in Silicon Valley.
FWDstart included Masad and Odeh in its MENA Diaspora 50 earlier this year.
