Emergent raises $23 million, hits $15 million ARR in 90 days

BENGALURU: Agentic app-building platform Emergent has raised $23 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed India, with participation from Together Fund, Y Combinator, Prosus Ventures and angel investors including Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, Mistral founding scientist and current Thinking Machines researcher Devendra Chaplot, and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.

The round takes the company’s total funding to $30 million. TOI had reported in August that the company was raising fresh capital at a valuation of $90 million, ahead of today’s announcement.

The three-month-old startup, founded by Dunzo co-founder Mukund Jha and his brother Madhav Jha this year, said the funds will be deployed toward team expansion, research and market growth. Emergent has already crossed $15 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) within 90 days of launch, with more than one million users building over two million apps on its platform.

“Emergent allows anybody with an idea and a phone to build production-ready apps,” co-founder and CEO Mukund Jha told TOI. “Other builders stop at prototyping. We’ve built a vertically integrated stack that covers front-end, back-end, deployment, payments and scaling, so users can go from a prompt to a fully functional product. Roughly half the apps on the platform today have some AI component.”

Adoption is coming from entrepreneurs digitising parts of their businesses, non-technical teams in functions like marketing or HR, as well as creators building personal productivity tools. Examples include a jewellery retailer in the US who built an AI-powered pricing app for repairs, small businesses creating custom CRMs and ERPs, and individuals developing trading apps. Surveys showed that for many users, Emergent is their first brush with both coding and AI, Jha said.

Jha added that the company’s edge lies in its in-house AI coding agent and custom-built infrastructure. “For the first six months, we were largely in research mode… Our own infrastructure, which bakes in automated testing, security checks and scaling, let us handle complex app builds end-to-end,” he said.

On competition from the broader no-code and low-code wave, Jha argued that Emergent is designed for non-developers rather than engineers. “Low-code tools often have steep learning curves and stop short of deployment. We’ve collapsed that complexity. The building experience feels like chatting with a developer who codes, tests and ships for you,” he said.

Emergent was part of Y Combinator’s 2024 summer batch, followed by a $7 million seed round led by Together Fund. “YC gave us the early network, Together brought first-principles operating guidance, while Lightspeed and Prosus are now helping us think about scale,” Jha added.