[Exclusive] Emergent Raises to $1.5 Bn, Wants to Become the Operating System for SMBs

Less than a year after launching publicly, Emergent has joined a very small club of Indian AI startups.

The Bengaluru-founded company has raised a $130 million Series C round led by Creaegis, with MNI Ventures, Claypond Capital and Sentinel Global joining as co-lead investors. Existing backers, including Khosla Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Y Combinator, also participated in the round.

The funding values Emergent at $1.5 billion, marking a fivefold jump in valuation in just four months and pushing the company into the unicorn club barely a year after its public launch.

The numbers behind the milestone are equally remarkable. More than 12 million applications have already been built on the platform, while annual recurring revenue has crossed $100 million. For a category that barely existed a few years ago, Emergent’s rise mirrors the speed at which AI is beginning to reshape software creation itself.

For Mukund Jha, Co-Founder and CEO of Emergent, however, valuations and funding rounds are not the story.

“We are on a mission to truly democratise software development for everyone,” Jha says in an exclusive interaction with AIM. “People who go through the problems should be the ones building the solutions. The funding gives us more firepower to continue building towards that mission.”

Emergent operates in one of the hottest segments in AI today: platforms that allow users to build software applications simply by describing what they want in natural language—commonly known as vibe coding.

In April this year, Emergent launched Wingman, an autonomous agent that integrates with the tools professionals and businesses already use to oversee ongoing tasks.

The Moat

Globally, more than 130 companies have emerged in the category, collectively attracting over $5 billion in investment. Competitors such as Lovable and Cursor have grown rapidly alongside the explosion in demand for AI-assisted software development.

But Emergent discovered something unexpected early on.

When the company launched in June last year, it assumed that product managers, designers, senior engineers and technically savvy users would become its primary customers.

Instead, business operators became the platform’s biggest user base.

“About 70% of our users have never seen a line of code in their life,” Jha says.

The users building on Emergent include factory owners creating internal ERP systems, real estate brokers building customer relationship management platforms and operators building internal workflow tools for their businesses.

While most of the world’s AI unicorns are still being assembled in San Francisco, Emergent’s centre of gravity remains firmly in Bengaluru. The company has only three employees in the Bay Area, with the vast majority of its engineering and product teams operating out of India as they build for a global audience.

Traditionally, these users would have depended on engineering teams, software vendors or development agencies to build custom applications. AI is changing that equation.

“These are people who are very close to the business problems they are solving,” Jha explains. “Now they are able to express those ideas themselves and build the software themselves.”

Today, hundreds of thousands of applications built on the platform are already running in production environments and driving business outcomes.

That trend has shaped Emergent’s product philosophy. The company wants users to think less about technology and more about outcomes.

Users do not need to understand databases, APIs, infrastructure, hosting or deployment. The platform manages everything from payments and integrations to security and privacy behind the scenes.

“Our promise is that you do not need to understand any of the technology complexity behind the scenes,” Jha says. “As long as you know what you are building and can describe it clearly, we will be able to build it for you.”

The Perfect Example

The funding round arrives at a time when the AI ecosystem is becoming increasingly fragmented and geopolitical tensions are beginning to affect access to frontier models.

Emergent currently relies on a combination of models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and the open-source ecosystem, using an internal routing system to decide which model should handle each task.

Simple requests are sent to smaller and cheaper models, while more complex reasoning tasks rely on frontier systems.

“What is increasingly becoming clear is that you do not need frontier models for every task,” Jha reveals. The company believes this hybrid approach allows it to reduce costs while maintaining performance.

Recent restrictions on access to certain frontier models have also reinforced another lesson for the industry: relying entirely on a single provider may become increasingly risky.

For Emergent, that is accelerating its ambitions to develop proprietary capabilities on top of open-source foundations.

“We have very strong data flywheels and large amounts of data that we are collecting,” Jha says. “Building our own models and reinforcement learning systems on top of open source is already on our roadmap.”

A significant portion of the newly raised capital will go towards accelerating product development and scaling global distribution. But the company’s ambitions stretch well beyond application building.

Jha wants Emergent to evolve into what he calls an operating system for small businesses.

The idea is that businesses should not just be able to build applications. They should be able to automate operations, run workflows and manage growth through AI agents that work continuously in the background.

“We want businesses to build, run, automate and grow using agents,” he says.

Opportunities Galore for India

The opportunity is enormous. Small businesses account for nearly half of the global economy and employ the majority of the world’s workforce. Yet, many have remained underserved by traditional enterprise software because existing tools were expensive, fragmented or overly complex.

Jha believes AI changes that permanently.

“Small businesses may skip the SaaS cycle altogether and directly move to the AI cycle,” he said.

That belief also shapes Emergent’s view of software engineering itself. Contrary to fears of job displacement, Jha expects demand for engineers to rise as software becomes dramatically cheaper to create.

As barriers to development disappear, more companies and more business functions will demand customised applications.

The bottleneck, in his view, shifts from writing code to deciding what should be built. Internally, smaller teams are already shipping products that previously required entire departments.

“We are seeing teams of three or four people deliver what larger teams used to build,” Jha says.

He expects the biggest winners to be engineers who learn how to work effectively with AI systems rather than compete against them. “People who adopt AI early are going to have exponentially more leverage than those who do not.”

Jha even predicts a future where token budgets become as important as payroll budgets.

“Soon engineers will have million-dollar token budgets to spend,” he says.

For now, the newly raised capital gives Emergent additional room to execute on its ambitions. The bigger question is whether the company can build a category-defining platform before the frontier labs themselves move further down the application stack.

Jha appears confident.

The goal, he says, is not to become another coding tool. It is to become the default operating system for businesses in an AI-native world.

“We want every business owner to focus on what they love doing. And we want to automate everything else.”

Jha hopes Emergent is not an exception but the beginning of a pattern. India already has the engineers, founders and market opportunities needed to build global AI companies. What it needs now, he argues, is a willingness to think bigger than the domestic market.