Agentic AI startup Emergent has secured a strategic investment from Google’s AI Futures Fund to develop its agentic vibe-coding platform. 

Without disclosing the funding amount, the startup said it will use the capital for talent acquisition, driving product development, and supporting its global expansion plans.

Emergent, founded by Dunzo cofounder Mukund Jha and his brother Madhav Jha, 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.

It 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 LLMs such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini.

In an interaction with Inc42 earlier, Mukund told Inc42 that Emergent’s vision is different from the likes of Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, Google’s Gemini AntiGravity or Cursor, other AI-powered coding platforms and integrated developer environments. The startup wants to abstract the entire software development lifecycle for non-technical users.

Emergent has a team of 40 members, with employees in India and the US. It claims to have 3 Mn active users, of which around 60,000 are paying users. It charges a monthly subscription fee ranging from $20 to $200. 

It last raised $23 Mn (about INR 204 Cr) in its Series A round led by Lightspeed Ventures in September. The funding round also saw participation from existing investors Y Combinator and Together Fund, as well as investors including Prosus, Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean, AI researcher Devendra Chaplot, and Coinbase cofounder Balaji Srinivasan.

Notably, Google’s AI Futures Fund’s strategic rationale centres on identifying and supporting AI startups poised to redefine software development accessibility. Through its investment, Emergent will gain not only capital but also early access to Google’s advanced AI models and technical guidance, including generative agents based on the latest Gemini 3 technology, as per its statement. 

The Rise Of Vibe-Coding Platforms

The fundraise comes at a time AI-driven vibe-coding platforms are gaining momentum and challenging traditional programming.

Recently, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan ignited a debate by saying on X that rapid advances in vibe-coding technologies could eventually make software companies like Zoho irrelevant. 

Zoho cofounder Sridhar Vembu dismissed the prediction, asserting that Zoho would outlive all vibe-coding startups in the long run. He added that he was working on a project which aims to enable “huge gains” in programmer productivity by combining compiler technology with AI.

Following that, Tan shared a screenshot of a news article in which Vembu had remarked that vibe coding “oversimplifies” software development, using it to suggest inconsistency in Vembu’s stance. Tan went further, arguing that Zoho’s model would soon face fierce competition from users empowered to build their own custom software using emerging platforms such as Replit, Emergent, and Taskade.

“Why pay $30 per seat per month for over-bundled SaaS when soon even non-tech ops people can vibe-code a custom solution in a weekend?” he wrote on X.