Emergent, co-founded by twin brothers Mukund and Madhav Jha, has raised $23 million in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed, bringing its total capital raised to $30 million. With the new funds, Emergent aims to transform app development by leveraging AI-powered “vibe coding” technology. This will enable non-developers to create fully functional web and mobile applications through simple natural language prompts, automating complex coding, backend management, and deployment tasks.
CEO Mukund Jha previously worked as CTO at the Google-backed quick commerce startup Dunzo in India, while Madhav has experience working in AI and machine learning at companies like Amazon and Dropbox. They saw early on that AI-powered coding could change everything, and they wanted to build a platform that puts powerful app-building tools in the hands of people without coding skills.
Emergent’s core technology centers on what they call “agentic vibe coding,” a system where users simply provide natural language prompts and AI agents handle the rest. These specialized agents build, test, and deploy fully functional, production-ready web and mobile applications autonomously.
Unlike many existing tools that only help create front-end prototypes, Emergent delivers a complete application stack, including backend, database, authentication, payment processing, and even hosting.
Simplifying the Tech
Emergent removes the usual pain points that come with app development. The platform manages the entire lifecycle of an app, from development to deployment, and also the post-launch maintenance. Users won’t have to worry about APIs, server setups, debugging, or scaling as all those technical bits will be handled in the background by Emergent’s AI agents. This will help anyone with no coding experience.
Since they launched 3 months ago, Emergent has seen significant growth. It’s already pulling in over $15 million in annual recurring revenue(ARR), with more than a million users having built upwards of 1.5 million apps worldwide.
The funding round was led by Lightspeed with participation from Y Combinator, Prosus Ventures’ Together Fund, and angel investors including former Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Balaji Srinivasan, Google AI guru Jeff Dean, and Devendra Chaplot from Mistral’s founding team.
“Emergent collapses the complexity of software into a single button anyone can press to ship, scale, earn, and Lightspeed is proud to back them on this exciting journey,” said Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed.
What Sets Them Apart?
Platforms like Replit or Lovable might help you sketch out an idea or build a prototype, but they often stop before getting your app fully ready to launch. Emergent goes a step further by taking care of everything, from testing and bug fixes to security and scaling.
Emergent’s pricing model is credit-based, where users consume credits based on actions like coding or deployment, offering flexibility as opposed to fixed subscription models popular with platforms like Bubble. This helps everyone, from ordinary people working on their first app to big companies launching large-scale projects. They pay for exactly what they need.
Additionally, the platform has a conversational interface, eliminating traditional form-filling or drag-and-drop complexity.
“It felt like a mission to automate coding as a challenge. We started looking at that problem almost three months back. Since then, we’ve been growing rapidly, with a lot of deep user love. It feels like a new revolution is coming where we can enable a billion people to build whatever they dream of,” said Mukund Jha.
Emergent wants to break down barriers and democratize software creation while allowing anyone with an idea and a phone to bring it to life affordably and efficiently.
