We are pleased to announce that Georgian has led Expo's $45M Series B round, with participation from existing insiders A.Capital Ventures, Leadout Capital and Red Swan Ventures.
Historically, mobile development has been defined by a frustrating reality: building an application on both iOS and Android meant building twice and dealing with a more difficult developer experience compared to web development. We believe the conditions are now in place for mobile app development to become easier and quicker, driven by advances in AI-assisted coding and the maturation of cross-platform frameworks like Expo.
We believe Expo’s platform is well positioned to lead the cross-platform transition.
Founded in 2015 by Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever and early Facebook engineer James Ide, Expo is a development platform that simplifies the fragmented mobile toolchain into a single end-to-end environment to build apps across iOS, Android and the web. Expo has vibrant community support demonstrated by the 3M+ developers building on Expo’s platform, the company’s apps reaching hundreds of millions of people, ~4 million weekly npm downloads and 50K+ Github Stars. Additionally, Expo is the official recommended framework for React Native. This endorsement is meaningful because it positions Expo as the starting point for most new mobile development projects, rather than a tool developers have to discover independently.
We first encountered Expo in early 2025 after members of the Georgian AI Lab experimented with the platform while prototyping a mobile tool and described their experience as "magical". This was not an isolated reaction, as other respected voices across the developer community, including Gergely Orosz of The Pragmatic Engineer, whose writing reaches hundreds of thousands of senior engineers globally, describe Expo in exactly the same terms saying, “Being able to live edit an app with zero development tooling feels magical”.
As we got to know Charlie, James and the Expo team, our conviction deepened. Expo has spent a decade focused on its mission to become “everything you need to build apps”. We believe Expo has reached an inflection point, as its end-to-end platform converges with the AI-driven surge in mobile app creation.
The Market Opportunity: Uncapping Mobile Innovation
The history of software is a series of moments when the cost and complexity of building fall below a critical threshold and the market expands dramatically as a result. Cloud computing democratised backend infrastructure and created a generation of SaaS startups. Vibe coding is now doing the same for web applications; 18 months ago, you needed expensive technical talent to ship a web app. Today, anyone can. In our view, the mobile application market will experience a similar shift. Despite mobile accounting for 60% of web traffic, and representing a $500B+ revenue engine, the tooling to support mobile applications is limited and full of friction, which we believe has constrained this market. We think that two main factors will converge and “uncap” mobile innovation and growth:
- Democratization of Software: The AI-assisted coding movement has led to a proliferation of new creators and new applications. The rise of vibe-coding tools and decreased friction in mobile development has led to iOS apps released to the app store experiencing ~60% YoY growth after multiple years of flat performance.
- Quickly Declining Total Cost of Ownership: Historically, building for iOS and Android required separate engineering teams and distinct codebases, leading to months of specialist work and friction that slowed feature delivery. Today, cross-platform frameworks have reached near-parity with native development. In our view, this simplification of the mobile tech-stack, combined with LLMs that can accelerate the refactoring of legacy apps to modern infrastructure, enables enterprises to dramatically reduce their total cost of ownership and achieve a positive ROI much sooner.
Why Expo?
Three factors gave us conviction that Expo is a defining platform in this market:
- Community & Developer Evangelism: The business has a loyal developer community supporting 3M+ developers, 4 million weekly npm downloads and ~50K GitHub stars — built over 10 years. With this Community, Expo has achieved strong organic growth, leading to the number of paying customers growing 250%+ YoY, all with minimal marketing spend.
- End-to-End Platform: We believe that Expo provides the most mature and unified suite of products to support developers at every stage of development.
- Develop: Ready-to-use building blocks and instant-testing environments like Expo Go.
- Deploy & Distribute: Cloud services that manage build pipelines and security certificates, automate app store submissions and allow teams to push over-the-air bug fixes quickly.
- Monitor: Built-in analytics and upcoming app performance tools to track error rates and monitor user adoption.
- The Infrastructure Rail for the AI app creation: Expo can be thought of as the “picks and shovels” for AI-assisted mobile development. We have observed Expo gaining traction in the AI assisted coding market due to:
- LLMs & Training Data: Because LLMs are trained heavily on React, a popular web framework and a core underpinning of React Native and Expo’s framework, AI-coding tools can understand and generate Expo-compatible code. This cycle can create a useful feedback loop: the more AI-generated mobile apps are built, the more entrenched Expo can become as the default layer beneath them.
- Strategic AI Partnerships: AI coding platforms like Replit (a Georgian portfolio company), Anything and Emergent have deep integrations with Expo as their underlying infrastructure to deploy mobile apps.
- End-to-end AI Iteration: Expo has also created a new AI-assisted coding tool, Expo Agent. This product will act as a forward-deployed Expo engineer, providing an end-to-end vertically integrated solution for creators and companies looking to build apps with production-grade reliability, but who lack deep mobile expertise.
What’s Next?
Expo presents a rare opportunity to partner with a team that has spent a decade building foundational
infrastructure and is now well-positioned at the center of the AI-assisted coding wave. With this Series B investment, Georgian will support Expo as it scales its infrastructure, deepens strategic partnerships and launches new AI and infrastructure products.