Led by Georgian, new funding and appointment of Seth Webster as Chief Developer Evangelist to accelerate Expo’s mission to make every mobile app built to ship
SAN FRANCISCO, April 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Expo, the open-source platform powering React Native development for millions of developers, today announced $45 million in Series B funding led by Georgian. The funding round, which also includes participation from Leadout Capital, A.Capital Ventures and Red Swan Ventures will accelerate Expo’s vision of shortening the path from idea to production. Alongside the raise, Expo launched Expo Agent, a forward deployed mobile expert that gives enterprise teams the equivalent of an embedded solutions engineer and welcomed Seth Webster as Chief Developer Evangelist.
According to Business of Apps, mobile applications generate more than $500B annually, yet the tooling supporting them has historically been fragmented and operationally complex. Founded in 2015 by early Facebook engineers and Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever, along with James Ide, Expo simplifies the entire lifecycle of building applications for iOS, Android, and the web, with a mission to be “everything you need to build apps.”
Expo already powers apps used by hundreds of millions of people, from startups to Fortune 500 companies, including Phantom, Pizza Hut, MTA and PrizePicks. With close to 4 million weekly downloads and a community of over 3 million developers, Expo has proven that removing friction doesn’t mean lowering quality standards. With the addition of agentic app development using Expo Agent, builders can now go from a simple idea to a fully functioning mobile app running on a device in minutes, without complex setup or native expertise, dramatically compressing development timelines while maintaining production-grade reliability.
“Expo has been the foundation of the MTA’s digital services team for over five years, and this year, we’re going deeper, launching our new Subway & Bus app on the platform,” said Will Fisher, Head of Digital at MTA. “Our 20-person team keeps 3 million daily riders connected to real-time transit updates across Metro-North, Long Island Rail Road, and New York City subway and bus systems. When a critical issue hits, we can identify, patch, and deploy a fix in under 90 seconds using Expo’s over-the-air updates. When you’re operating at the scale of New York’s transit system, you don’t experiment with your infrastructure, you double down on a technology partner you never have to worry about.”
The investment will accelerate development of Expo’s core platform with faster builds, deeper native integrations, and an improved developer experience, while advancing agentic tooling for AI-assisted development, starting with Expo Agent, now available in public beta. Representing Expo’s first step into agentic programming, Expo Agent is designed to help humans and AI build truly native, production-ready apps together, understanding the platform-specific patterns, configurations, and constraints of modern mobile development. Expo Agent is like a forward deployed engineer that can scaffold projects with production-ready architecture, debug complex native integrations, recommend optimal deployment configurations, and identify issues before they reach production.
“The problem with agentic app development is that business critical apps are not making it to production,” said Charlie Cheever, co-founder of Expo. “That is the problem we are positioned to solve at Expo. We built the infrastructure for mobile apps and we can bake that infrastructure into Expo Agent. Our mission is to give every builder — whether they’re a solo founder, an enterprise team, or someone working alongside AI agents — the infrastructure to ship production-grade apps that scale and succeed.”
To help accelerate ecosystem growth and cement Expo’s role as the default path from idea to production, the company has welcomed Seth Webster as Chief Developer Evangelist. Seth will lead Expo’s platform narrative in an AI-native development future, drive adoption across startups, enterprises, and global developer communities, and deepen strategic partnerships with infrastructure partners, platform stakeholders, and device manufacturers. He will work closely with product, engineering, and executive leadership to align roadmap decisions with ecosystem needs and long-term platform durability.
“We’re at a moment where the React Native ecosystem is expanding faster than ever, fueled by AI-assisted development, new enterprise entrants, and a global community pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on mobile,” said Seth. “From solo builders to enterprise teams scaling for millions of users, my focus is on making sure that every developer who picks up Expo finds a platform that meets them where they are and grows with them. Expo has earned deep trust in this community. This role is about widening that path and making sure the best infrastructure for mobile is also the most accessible.”
The funding enables Expo to support a growing universe of builders, from engineers shipping at scale and founders testing new ideas to enterprise teams accelerating development without sacrificing reliability, as well as new entrants working alongside AI, while strengthening enterprise-grade performance, security, and compliance for apps at scale.
“Expo has reached an inflection point, evolving from a popular open-source framework into an increasingly important infrastructure layer for cross-platform app development,” said Emily Walsh, Lead Investor at Georgian. “By collapsing the fragmented mobile toolchain and capitalizing on the surge of AI-assisted coding, we believe Expo is democratizing how applications are built and maintained at scale. We have been inspired by the team’s decade-long commitment to the developer experience and we are proud to partner with them as they work to make app development more accessible and reliable for enterprises and developers.”
About Expo
Expo is the open-source platform and framework for building universal native apps with React Native. Used by millions of developers worldwide, Expo provides everything needed to create, deploy, and maintain production-ready mobile applications — from local development tools to cloud infrastructure for building, updating, and monitoring apps at scale. Founded in 2015, Expo is committed to making excellent software development more accessible. Learn more at expo.dev.
About Georgian
Georgian is a growth equity firm investing in B2B technology companies, taking a concentrated approach of 6 investments per year and providing both capital and technical capability to help portfolio companies scale. Georgian has been active in analytics and applied AI since its founding in 2008 and invests across the AI technology stack, from infrastructure and applications to cybersecurity and developer tools. Georgian’s in-house AI Lab of 20+ ML engineers and scientists works with portfolio companies on production AI deployment. Georgian’s team brings together investors with machine learning professionals, software entrepreneurs and experienced operators aiming to provide a differentiated experience across the entire investment lifecycle. The firm manages $5.7B AUM (as of September 30, 2025) and has invested in more than 80 companies.
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