Emergent becomes the latest unicorn in India's AI space with Series C funding

Bengaluru- and San Francisco-based Emergent has become the latest unicorn in India's AI space following its latest round of funding. The $130 million Series C funding, led by Creaegis, along with Claypond and Sentinel Global, values the company at $1.5 billion.

The funding round also saw participation from existing investors such as Khosla Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator. The AI agent-powered vibe coding platform, founded in 2024, claims that more than 12 million applications have been built by users since its launch. With a current annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $120 million, the company is targeting $500 million over the next 12-15 months.

Speaking to Fortune India, Mukund Jha, co-founder and CEO of Emergent, said the valuation is a strong validation of the company's execution on a global scale. Below are the edited excerpts from the interview.

Can you share with us your current scale of operations, user base and long-term monetisation roadmap?

Mukund Jha: We are a very global platform with users in 190 countries, and our revenue is evenly distributed. Roughly one-third each comes from North America, Europe and the rest of the world. What we are seeing on the platform right now is very strong retention, and most of the revenue comes from serious builders—people who are actually building complex business applications like CRMs, ERPs and inventory tracking systems that traditionally would have gone to a dev shop but are now able to build themselves. We don't just build apps; we also allow people to host these apps on our platform. And that's where a lot of recurring revenue comes from. Once a user deploys an app with us, they pay a subscription fee to keep the app deployed, and then they continue to come back for enhancements and feature additions. We are also seeing a lot of uptake in post-deployment services.

What large language models do you currently use?

Mukund Jha: We are using a mixture of all the models that are available—frontier models like Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini, as well as open-source models—to power our experience, depending on the complexity of the app. These models each have their own strengths, and a combination of different models provides a superior experience to our users.

How are you currently looking at the cost of tokens, and how are you factoring in future pricing fluctuations in your offerings?

Mukund Jha: I think there are two trends right now. One, the price per token has largely remained constant, even though models have become significantly more intelligent. If you look at the price per unit of intelligence, it has actually come down 100x since the launch of GPT-4. There is also a lot of momentum in open-source AI, which creates a meaningful alternative for people like us to build on top of. What we need to look at is the outcome people are getting by using these AI tools and how that compares with the economic value being created. For instance, mobile apps have traditionally been very complex and expensive to build. Today, it is one of the fastest-growing categories on Emergent, and close to 15-18% of our revenue comes from mobile app building, compared with roughly 5% in the previous quarter.

Could you share insights into Emergent's adoption in India? What are Indians using it for?

Mukund Jha: India is fascinating. Today, roughly 8-9% of our revenue comes from India, and it's growing really fast, which is exciting to see. Obviously, the top cities are important, but we are also seeing strong adoption in Tier-II and Tier-III cities. A lot of young entrepreneurs and small and medium businesses in India are using our platform to build applications and AI agents. For instance, I was recently talking to a user in Jaipur who runs a printing shop on a Windows 7 laptop. He has built an app where customers can simply send pictures of what they want on WhatsApp. The request goes directly to our AI system, which creates the image and prints it for him.

How do you deal with data and data hosting on the platform?

Mukund Jha: We use localised data centres and regional cloud capabilities. Users can host their data in the region they choose. When they deploy an app, they have the option to select the region where they want to host it. The choice is entirely left to the user.