Chroma, the AI database millions of developers learned on, is joining Replit and shutting its cloud in 60 days

Chroma, the company behind ChromaDB, one of the most widely used open-source databases for building AI apps, has signed a definitive agreement to join Replit, the AI app-building platform. Chroma’s chief executive Jeff Huber announced the deal on October 23, saying the two will build “the context layer for the self-driving company”. Neither company has disclosed the price or other terms.

For developers the most urgent part of the news is further down Huber’s post: Chroma Cloud, the company’s paid hosted service, is being shut down over the next 60 days. Open-source ChromaDB carries on.

Chroma Cloud stops taking writes on November 22

Chroma published a wind-down timeline with two cut-off dates:

• November 22, 2026: Chroma Cloud becomes read-only. Apps can no longer create, update or delete data, so anything that writes to it needs to be stopped or moved to another Chroma deployment or database before then.
• December 22, 2026: Chroma Cloud stops serving reads. All exports must be finished and checked by this date, and customers are told to remove or rotate the Chroma Cloud credentials stored in their apps.

Chroma says the shutdown applies only to the existing cloud service, and is pointing affected customers to [email protected]. It hasn’t said how many paying customers Chroma Cloud has, or whether Replit plans its own hosted version.

Open-source ChromaDB stays, with extra code

Huber says open-source Chroma gets about 6 million downloads a month and is “just shy of 30k” stars on GitHub. To give it “the strongest continuity story”, Chroma has moved more code from its private repositories into the public project, which stays under the permissive Apache 2.0 licence. Replit, Huber says, “will continue to contribute back to the project as it extends it for enterprise context.”

ChromaDB came out in early 2023, soon after ChatGPT made retrieval-augmented generation (feeding a chatbot your own documents) a common way to build AI apps. Huber says that at one point Chroma estimated it had over 95% of all downloads for vector search, a company figure that can’t be checked independently. He lists SpaceXAI, Mintlify, Krea, Paramount, Retool and CoreWeave among its customers, “and tens of thousands of others”.

‘We first met Jeff and the team in early 2023’

This is not a deal between strangers. Replit’s CEO Amjad Masad and president Michele Catasta were early investors in Chroma; Masad was named as an angel in Chroma’s $18 million seed round in April 2023. Catasta said in Huber’s post:

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.

Michele Catasta, president of Replit

Replit has not put out its own announcement yet. Its chief executive was in the news last week when he said Replit had dropped Anthropic’s Claude for OpenAI’s models, a claim a person familiar with the partnership disputed.

From vector search to company memory

Huber says Chroma’s next phase was always going to be “enterprise context”. In the middle of 2026 it started work on Foundation, which it describes as self-improving context for organisations, and says it reached state-of-the-art results on the BEAM memory benchmark. Both ChromaDB and Foundation will carry on inside Replit, where Chroma’s technology will be paired with Replit’s agent platform and its sales reach. “We have a lot up our sleeves,” Huber wrote.

The goal, in Huber’s words, is “a company where agents do more and more of the work, because they know everything the organization knows.”

Why it matters

ChromaDB is the database many developers first reached for when building AI apps, so a Replit takeover puts a big piece of open-source AI infrastructure inside one app-building company. The 60-day cloud shutdown is short notice for teams running production apps on Chroma Cloud, and the first deadline is less than a month away.

Sources: Chroma, Chroma Cloud wind-down timeline, Chroma (2023 seed round).