Emergent turns unicorn with $130-million funding
Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Emergent has become India’s latest unicorn, after receiving $130 million in a Series C funding round, which values the software-creation platform at $1.5 billion, a fivefold jump in value from four months ago.
The round was led by Creaegis, with Claypond Capital and Sentinel Global as co-lead investors, and participation from existing backers Khosla Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed and Y Combinator. The company has raised $230 million in total funding, since being launched in June 2025.
Despite earlier talk of an enterprise push, Mukund Jha, co-founder and CEO, says Emergent hasn’t gone deep into that market yet. Their fast-paced growth is currently coming from small and medium businesses. “These are businesses which have traditionally been running on pen, paper, spreadsheet, email,” he says, speaking from Bengaluru on Thursday, where he is based. “And the regular software that is available in the market is either too complex or does not fit the existing workflow.” The range of what’s being built, he says, spans “from motorcycle school to a dance class to a yoga studio to a factory to car dealerships to real estate”.
Jha frames this as a structural gap rather than a niche opportunity. “Every SaaS software, has to move up market to justify the cost of sales and marketing,” he says, because building for every small vertical individually has never been commercially viable for a traditional software company.
“Just like India skips one generation of technology—we skipped laptop, moved to mobile, we skipped 3G to 4G— small businesses operate in a similar way,” he says. “We believe small businesses are going to skip the whole SaaS cycle and move to the AI cycle, and that’s what we’re trying to enable them to do.”
Investors are making the same bet. “Small businesses today have a historic moment to build, automate, and operate using autonomous platforms and address disadvantages from the previous era,” says Prakash Parthasarathy, managing partner, Creaegis. “Emergent is enabling every entrepreneur and business to embrace this change with production-grade software and automation.”
Emergent’s Series B funding round closed in December, at a $300-million valuation. Since then, Jha says, “our business has grown almost 4x, both in revenue and in terms of user base.” He claims gross margin, customer acquisition cost and retention are all moving “meaningfully… towards the right direction”, although he does not provide any figures for this growth.
The combination, he says, is what built the conviction behind the new valuation, alongside a broader shift in how the market reads the vibe-coding category itself. “When the vibe-coding category started, there was a lot of scepticism about whether it was going to be for hobbies. They are going to stick around, and as the data has matured, we’re seeing good retention.” Jha confirms the company has more than 2 lakh paying customers, though he declined to share conversion rates from free to paid users.
Speaking on competition, Jha draws a sharp line between Emergent’s audience and that of developer-first tools. “If you look at Claude Code and Cursor, they are extremely developer-focussed,” he says. “Our users have never seen a line of code in their life. Our bet is that we’ll give them a fully autonomous platform, including testing, debugging, hosting, environment, security.” Such a platform also gives users a cost advantage: “A human developer is roughly 10x to 50x more expensive,” he says. “Software that would have taken them $200,000 or $500,000 to build can be built for less than $5,000 this way.”
Jha also points to a compounding advantage from owning the full stack: “We have built all the infrastructure ourselves; we have built our own coding agent. Every time a new app gets built on the platform, our platform improves.”
Jha had co-founded Dunzo, a grocery delivery startup in 2014. When ChatGPT was launched in 2022, “it was pretty clear to us that something was going to change,” he says. He quit Dunzo in 2023, and with his brother Madhav being an early deep learning researcher at Amazon, the two moved quickly. The initial idea of Emergent was to “automate software testing, because testing amounts to about 40 percent of software production costs.”
It was a hard sell in a pre-Claude, pre-Cursor market. “We were rejected by a lot of venture capitalists who said the idea was too crazy and might not work,” he recalls. Eventually, it was a stint at Y Combinator that pushed them towards vibe-coding as a category.
The capital will be used for go-to-market expansion and the platform’s success rate as users build more complex, business-critical applications. On the product roadmap, Emergent has recently launched a mobile app-building experience and plans to let users build agents on the platform, with enterprise remaining a possible—but not yet prioritised—future market. “I think over the next year, we’ll see our growth compound, and a lot more success stories coming out of Emergent,” Jha says.
