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Michele Catasta

President (joined as VP of AI in 2023), Replit

  • President (joined as VP of AI in 2023), Replit123

Michele Catasta is the President of Replit, which Catasta joined in 2023 as VP of AI, and has led the projects behind Replit Agent and its later versions, Agent 3 and Agent 4. Before Replit, Catasta was Head of Applied Research at Google X and Google Labs, working on large language models for code including PaLM and PaLM 2; Catasta has also been a research scientist and instructor in AI at Stanford University.123

At a glance

Current role
President (joined as VP of AI in 2023)
Company
Replit
Sector
Company
Education
Stanford
Work listed
1
Sources cited
5
Profile reviewed

Career

Catasta was a postdoc in machine learning at Stanford University advised by Jure Leskovec, and worked as a research scientist and instructor in AI at Stanford. Earlier, Catasta co-founded Sindice.com, a Semantic Web search engine whose technology evolved into the Apache Any23 project.2

At Google X and Google Labs, Catasta was Head of Applied Research, working on large language models for code, including PaLM-Coder and code pre-training and evaluation for PaLM 2, and designed the Google AI4Code Kaggle challenge. Catasta joined Replit as VP of AI in June 2023 and is now listed as the company's President.231

Work at Replit

Catasta published the Replit AI Manifesto on joining the company and was principal investigator for Replit Code Repair, announced in April 2024. Catasta led the Replit Agent project, launched in September 2024, and its later versions, including Agent 4 in March 2026.3245

Catasta was one of the instructors, with Andrew Ng, of the "Vibe Coding 101 with Replit" short course on DeepLearning.AI in 2025, and was principal investigator of ViBench, a benchmark on vibe coding accepted at ACM CAIS 2026.2

Work and contributions

  • Replit Agent Proprietary product

    Led the Replit Agent project, launched to the public in September 2024, and its successors Agent v2 (2025), Agent 3 (2025) and Agent 4 (2026).245

Timeline

  1. Co-authored the Code Transformer paper on language-agnostic representation learning of source code, accepted at ICLR 2021.2
  2. Worked on code pre-training and evaluations for PaLM 2, announced at Google I/O.2
  3. Joined Replit as VP of AI and published the Replit AI Manifesto.3
  4. Served as principal investigator for Replit Code Repair, announced at Replit Developer Day.2
  5. Led the public launch of Replit Agent.24
  6. Led the public launch of Replit Agent 3.2
  7. Led the public launch of Replit Agent 4.25

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

Where they work

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References

5 sources · profile reviewed Oct 22, 2026 · data updated Oct 22, 2026

  1. About Replit — leadership teamReplit · Official page · accessed Oct 22, 2026
  2. pirroh (Michele Catasta) — GitHub profile READMEMichele Catasta (GitHub) · Official page · accessed Oct 22, 2026
  3. Replit AI Manifesto (Replit blog)Replit · Announcement · published Jun 5, 2023 · accessed Oct 22, 2026
  4. Introducing Replit Agent (Replit blog)Replit · Announcement · published Sep 2024 · accessed Oct 22, 2026
  5. Introducing Agent 4, built for creativity (Replit blog)Replit · Announcement · published Mar 11, 2026 · accessed Oct 22, 2026