StackBlitz rose from the dead: from zombie startup to $40 million in 3 months

The story of the StackBlitz startup resembles a real resurrection from the dead. The company was founded back in ’17 by school friends Eric Simons and Albert Pai. Their first product WebContainers allowed developers to create and manage projects directly in the browser, without the need to use local laptop resources.

6 years later, the company turned into a zombie startup, which still exists but no longer develops. Despite support from solid investors, including the Insight Partners fund.

And a representative of Insight Partners set a deadline — by the end of ’24, they needed to determine the fate of StackBlitz. The founders were downcast, since no breakthrough with their current technologies was foreseen. However, they were simultaneously studying how various artificial intelligence models cope with programming. And decided to create a new service based on this model for so-called “vibe coding.” An approach where the user explains in words what they need, and the service independently writes code. The product was named Bolt.new and was developed by a team of 10 employees in 3 months.

And then in the first week, the service brought in $1 million of annual recurring revenue!! And another week later — another million. A month after launch, investors received a letter with an impressive headline: “From zero to $4 million ARR in 30 days.” In the first few weeks, the number of users grew to 14 thousand.