AI startup Emergent turns unicorn with $130M Series C funding

Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Emergent, founded by brothers Mukund Jha and Madhav Jha, has raised $130 million in a Series C funding round at a valuation of $1.5 billion.

The round was led by Creaegis, with MNI Ventures - Claypond Capital and Sentinel Global joining as co-lead investors. Existing backers Khosla Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator also participated.

The startup said it will use the funds to hire talent across the United States and India, accelerate product development, and expand its go-to-market efforts.

Based in San Francisco and Bengaluru, Emergent was valued at $300 million during its Series B funding round in January this year. The latest fundraise takes its total capital raised to $230 million across three funding rounds.

Founded in 2024, Emergent enables individuals and small businesses to build software using natural language prompts through its agentic AI platform.

“The software requirement for every business is different and for the first time with AI we can potentially serve all these million customers at almost zero marginal cost,” Emergent co-founder Mukund Jha told YourStory.

Since its launch, more than 12 million applications have been built on the platform, with its users comprising predominantly individuals and small businesses.

Explaining the platform's use cases, Jha cited the example of a truck fleet owner in the United States who previously coordinated operations manually over WhatsApp but has since built a mobile application using Emergent for all of his drivers.

“The truck owner used to pay around $25,000 annually for software and now he is paying $100 million for the application he built,” Jha remarked.

Jha said Emergent's goal is to democratise software development by making custom applications affordable and accessible to small businesses. The platform is now available in 190 countries, with roughly one-third of its revenue coming from the United States, another one-third from Europe, and about 9% from India.

"We are reimagining a world where the people closest to the problem should be able to solve it by building their own software," Jha said.

He added that custom software development typically costs between $50,000 and $500,000, while platforms such as Emergent can deliver similar solutions for $1,000-$5,000.

The company aims to enable users with no programming knowledge to build production-ready software. Applications built on the platform include digital storefronts, marketplaces, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) software, and financial dashboards.

“Small businesses today have a historic moment to build, automate, and operate using autonomous platforms and address their disadvantages in the previous era,” said Prakash Parthasarathy, Managing Partner, Creaegis.

“Emergent is enabling every entrepreneur and business to embrace this change with production-grade software and automation.”

Looking ahead, Emergent plans to build a full-fledged operating system that will allow businesses to automate their operations end-to-end.