Chroma is joining Replit#
October 23, 2026
Today I’m excited to announce that Chroma has signed a definitive agreement to join Replit.
Together, we will build the context layer for the self-driving company: a company where agents do more and more of the work, because they know everything the organization knows.
Chroma's beginning#
From the beginning, Chroma has been deeply focused on bringing the right data to AI. We started in 2022 to solve active learning for curating training data for deep learning. When ChatGPT was released, we shifted our focus from training to inference - solving the problem of context for agents.
“Layman's version of the enterprise value: what if you could feed a "really smart person" all your company's data and then ask them questions about it.”
-> an email I wrote to a Chroma investor in Jan 2023.
Scaling ChromaDB#
We released ChromaDB the following month and it exploded in popularity. At one point we estimated that we had over 95% of the downloads for vector search. We invested deeply for years to build the open-source, distributed, and serverless database that ChromaDB is today. It remains unparalleled for its speed, cost-profile, multi-tenancy and scalability. That database powers workloads for customers like SpaceXAI, Mintlify, Krea, Paramount, Retool, Coreweave and tens of thousands of others.
Our technical reports on Context Rot and Context-1 have stood the test of time. We also published deep dives on Fission transactions, object-storage native retrieval, wal3 (our WAL on S3), and our query execution engine.
Building Foundation#
In the middle of 2026 - it became apparent that the next inflection point in our growth was going to come from serving enterprise context - the context layer. We began work on Foundation - our solution to self-improving context for organizations. Foundation hit SOTA on the BEAM memory benchmark and trended on Ramp insights immediately after release.
Why Replit#
Michele Catasta and Amjad Masad (President and CEO of Replit respectively) were early investors in Chroma and it became increasingly obvious to us both that we could do far more together than apart. Chroma’s state-of-the-art infrastructure for context and memory combined with Replit’s broader agent platform technology and scaled-GTM motion are a powerful combination. We’re excited to continue our work on ChromaDB and Foundation at Replit building the foundational technology for the self-driving company. We have a lot up our sleeves.
“We first met Jeff and the team in early 2023 and were immediately struck by the talent and deep thinking about what an AI infrastructure layer would look like as AI and agents were rapidly adopted. We have been following their progress and could not be more excited to have them on our team to accelerate our development in this area.” - Michele Catasta
Impact for Cloud customers#
In this transition over the next 60 days - we are responsibly winding down our existing cloud service. If this impacts you, please review the Chroma Cloud wind-down timeline.
Open source Chroma continues#
Open-source Chroma remains strong at 6M downloads a month and just shy of 30k Github stars. We have committed additional code from our private repos to the Apache 2.0 repo to give the strongest continuity story for open-source Chroma. Replit will continue to contribute back to the project as it extends it for enterprise context.
Thank you#
I want to say thank you to every open-source user, cloud customer, team member, and investor along this journey. We built something rare and special - a truly beloved piece of technology that introduced millions of developers to context for AI. We’re excited to continue building this technology to impact millions more at Replit.
— Jeff Huber, CEO Chroma
