This is the story of a seven-year overnight success.

In just 8 weeks last fall, StackBlitz’s new agentic app development product Bolt.new grew from $0 to $20M in annualized revenue. And it has only kept growing. What makes this growth extraordinary isn’t just the numbers – it’s that it represents the convergence of years of patient innovation with a transformative new capability. Since 2017, Eric Simons and the team have been building their WebContainers technology and cultivating a passionate developer community. When they combined those assets with their new AI agent, Bolt, everything changed.

This convergence is why we at Madrona are so excited to partner with StackBlitz on their journey to transform how software is built – and who can build it.

We’ve seen remarkable progress in AI code generation, with tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor dramatically accelerating professional developers’ workflows. But Bolt is different – it’s an AI Agent for building, editing, and deploying applications directly from your browser. Just describe the app you want to build in natural language or with a Figma design, and Bolt will create and deploy that app. Users can iterate and modify their applications through natural language prompts or dive into the code directly. This end-to-end approach fundamentally changes who can create software and what they can build. 

Beyond the Numbers: Real Usage, Real Impact

While Bolt’s growth numbers have captured attention, what’s most exciting is how it’s already becoming part of users’ daily workflows. 

Beyond the experimental usage that typically emerges when new markets are created, Bolt has already earned the trust of the professional knowledge worker, who returns to work on apps they’ve already created and create new ones over and over again. An impressive proportion of users return to Bolt every single day, even on weekends!

Users are now finding creative ways to interact with Bolt to create anything from full-stack web apps to front-end dev apps to a new type of prototyping that sits between traditional code and design – and what is most striking, non-technical users who have little to no coding experience are creating most of these. We’re seeing three distinct patterns emerge:

The rapid adoption of AI development tools has already transformed how software gets built. But we’re now entering a new, much larger phase. Professional developers are using Bolt to blast through their backlogs at unprecedented speed, while domain experts are building their own custom applications without writing code. While the initial $10-20B market for developer tools is compelling, solutions like Bolt are positioned to capture a slice of the $500B+ professional services market by fundamentally challenging what it means to build with software.

The Power of WebContainers + AI

What makes Bolt unique isn’t just its AI interface – it’s the foundation of the WebContainers technology that StackBlitz has been building for 7 years, which gives Bolt unprecedented advantages in speed, cost, and ease of use. By running applications directly in users’ browsers, StackBlitz dramatically reduces the infrastructure needed to build and test applications. Whether you start with a natural language prompt or upload a Figma design, Bolt turns your intent into working applications with remarkable efficiency.

Madrona’s Long-Term Vision

At Madrona, we’ve long invested in tools that expand the initial developer market – from platforms like Statsig, Temporal, and Pulumi to UiPath’s mission of empowering information workers. StackBlitz represents the next evolution of this thesis, fundamentally changing both who can build software and what they can build. StackBlitz democratizes web app building to a whole new level, enabling tens if not hundreds of millions of people to build web applications seamlessly without having to rely on professional developers.

The fusion of StackBlitz’s proven WebContainers technology with their new AI agent capabilities positions them uniquely in this transformation. Their years of patient innovation have created advantages in performance, cost, and user experience that would be difficult for competitors to replicate. Combined with early signs of sticky user behavior and enterprise interest, we believe StackBlitz is poised to lead this next phase of app development democratization.

We’re thrilled to partner with Eric and his team, collaborating alongside our friends Emergence, GV, and Conviction as we build on seven years of innovation to capture this extraordinary opportunity.

The post Investing in StackBlitz appeared first on Madrona.

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