Girish Mathrubootham weighs in on Emergent revenue debate

Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham on Monday stepped into a public debate about the reported revenue of AI startup Emergent, urging people to be cautious about judging private company numbers from the outside. Mathrubootham’s Together fund is an early investor in Emergent.

In a post on X, he wrote, “A private company does not need to disclose any numbers and nobody should care about those numbers except the founders, investors in the company and employees… For outsiders who don’t have all the details, we should assume that founders know the best about their business and let them execute.”

His comments came after weeks of discussion about Emergent, a fast growing AI startup founded by Mukund Jha and Madhav Jha, which claims to help people build software using artificial intelligence and natural language. The company has attracted global investor interest and raised funding from firms including Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Prosus and Lightspeed.

The debate centres on Emergent’s claim that it reached $100 million in ARR in eight months. ARR in this case stands for annualised revenue run rate, a common startup metric that estimates yearly revenue from subscriptions. However, in modern AI companies, revenue can include subscriptions, usage fees and deployment charges, which makes the metric more complex than traditional software subscriptions.

Emergent CEO Mukund Jha announced the milestone in February, saying the company had scaled extremely quickly. He wrote, “Emergent is now at 100M ARR (run rate). We got here in 8 months. One of the fastest-ever to do it… Real people are building real solutions for problems big and small, across personal and professional use cases.”

The company’s growth has been rapid. It reached about $50 million in ARR in seven months of launch and has users across many countries, offering a platform where people can build and deploy apps without writing code. Some industry experts say this growth is linked to the rise of AI tools that allow non-programmers to build software quickly.

The claim has faced scrutiny when some analysts and reports questioned whether Emergent’s ARR was calculated in the traditional SaaS way (annual recurring revenue) or as an annualised run rate. Annualised run rate means taking one month’s revenue and projecting it for a full year, which can make numbers look larger if revenue is growing quickly.

In response to the criticism, Mukund Jha told Moneycontrol that the company had collected about $8.3 million in cash revenue in one month (March), which annualises to roughly $100 million. Investor Vinod Khosla supported the company’s explanation and said that revenue metrics are changing in AI businesses, in the report. He said, in effect, that there are many ways ARR is measured today but cash collections are clear and measurable.

This difference between ARR and annualised revenue run rate is at the heart of the debate. Traditional SaaS companies usually report ARR based on contracted subscription revenue. New AI companies often have mixed pricing models that include usage based billing, which makes revenue more variable and harder to compare directly with older software companies.

Mathrubootham’s post highlighted a broader view among some founders and investors that startup metrics are often misunderstood in public discussions. At the same time, the scrutiny shows how important revenue claims have become in the AI startup race, where companies are trying to show rapid growth to attract investors and talent.

The Emergent debate is not only about one startup’s numbers. It is about how revenue is defined in the new AI software industry, and whether traditional startup metrics still apply in the same way.