Emergent Bags $23 Mn From Lightspeed, Others To Automate App Development

Agentic AI startup Emergent, founded by ex-Dunzo cofounder and CTO Mukund Jha along with his brother Madhav Jha, has raised $23 Mn (approximately INR 204 crore) in its Series A round led by Lightspeed Ventures with a $13 Mn infusion. 

The funding round also saw participation from existing investors Y Combinator and Together Fund, as well as new investors including Prosus, Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean, AI researcher Devendra Chaplot, and Coinbase cofounder Balaji Srinivasan.

The startup plans to utilise the fresh capital to expand its team, double down on research, and further develop its platform. 

Founded in 2024, Emergent provides a platform that allows users to build production-ready apps autonomously using AI agents. These agents help create backend logic, data models, APIs, and user interfaces through natural language prompts.

Emergent allows users to interact with the platform as they would with a developer—prompting the agent through natural conversation to build, customise and launch fully functional applications across both frontend and backend.

The platform is powered by a hybrid AI model stack that combines proprietary, fine-tuned in-house models for specific tasks with integrations of leading large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini.

The startup earns primarily from a freemium subscription model with tiered plans. New users receive free credits to explore the platform, while paid subscriptions start at $10–$20 per month for the starter tier and go up to $200 per month for the pro tier, with pricing adjusted across geographies. 

In addition, users can purchase “top-up” credits when they need extra resources for app development. Hosting and deployment are billed separately, ranging from $10 to $50 per month depending on the complexity and requirements of the application.

Since its launch about three months back, the startup claims to have attained $15 Mn in annual recurring revenue (ARR), allowing about 1 Mn users to build 1.5 Mn apps. Prior to this round, it raised $7 Mn in its seed round led by Y Combinator and Together Fund.

Important to note that Mukund Jha left Dunzo in 2023 after spending over eight years building and leading its tech function. He cofounded Dunzo in 2014 with Kabeer Biswas, Ankur Agarwal, and Dalvir Suri, at a time when hyperlocal delivery was still an untested idea in India. However, the startup dwindled amid challenges like major cash crunch and exodus at the top deck. 

With his new startup, the founder is bullish on cracking the global custom software development market, which is poised to grow to $146.2 Bn by 2030.