Lightspeed leads $23 mn funding in Emergent AI app-building platform

AI startup Emergent raises $23 million Series A led by Lightspeed as platform hits $15 million ARR in 90 days with 1.5 million apps built from natural language prompts

Emergent, the agentic vibe-coding platform, has raised $23 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed, with participation from Together Fund, Y Combinator, Prosus Ventures and angels including Jeff Dean, Devendra Chaplot and Balaji Srinivasan. This brings Emergent’s total funding to $30 million, including a $7 million seed round backed by Y Combinator and Together Fund. The funds will be used to expand the team, deepen research investments and scale the platform. Vibe coding uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate functional code from natural language prompts.

 

“My brother and I built Emergent to equip anyone with an idea and a phone to create software affordably,” said Mukund Jha, co-founder and CEO, Emergent. “Emergent addresses the technical friction of starting or growing a business. Now anyone, from small business owners and aspiring founders to creators, can bring their vision to life, no matter how complex, at a fraction of the time and cost. Our platform unlocks new possibilities for everyone — not just software engineers.”

 

 

The platform enables small businesses, solo founders and creators to build and launch production-ready software without writing code. Emergent delivers a ready-to-use app from day one, handling screens, servers, logins, payments and scalability automatically. Behind the scenes, a team of AI agents codes, tests and launches, effectively acting as a virtual development team in the cloud.

 

“Remember when photography demanded understanding lenses, aperture, lighting, film development and more? Then the iPhone compressed all of it into a single button for billions of people. Emergent collapses the complexity of software into a single button anyone can press to ship, scale and earn, and Lightspeed is proud to back them on this journey,” said Hemant Mohapatra, partner at Lightspeed.

 

In India, where six in 10 people consider entrepreneurship a good career path, Emergent removes the traditional barriers of needing capital, developers or a technical co-founder. The platform’s AI coding agent and rapid-deployment infrastructure were built entirely in-house to ensure security, speed and reliability. Users receive an app that is launch-ready with built-in logins, payments and backend scalability.

 

The product has gained rapid adoption. In just 90 days, Emergent surpassed $15 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and enabled over one million users to build more than 1.5 million apps.

 

Emergent’s impact spans diverse users globally. A jewellery store owner in Michigan built an app to manage pricing across 50 stores and is now selling it to others. A small business digitised wheelchair inventory using photos and prompts. One user created an app to manage chronic pain, while a UK-based founder of Indian origin built an EV marketplace app to serve a growing market.