Agentic AI Start-Up Emergent Raises $23 Mn in Series A from Lightspeed, Other Investors

Agentic AI start-up Emergent has raised $23 million in its Series A round led by Lightspeed Ventures with a $13 million contribution. Other investors like Together Fund, Y Combinator, Prosus Ventures, Jeff Dean, Devendra Chaplot, and Balaji Srinivasan also participated in the round.

The start-up plans to use the fresh capital to expand its team, double down on research, and further develop its platform, which was founded by ex-Dunzo cofounder and CTO Mukund Jha, along with his brother Madhav Jha.

Mukund exited Dunzo in 2023 after steering its technology arm for more than eight years. He had cofounded Dunzo in 2014 alongside Kabeer Biswas, Ankur Agarwalm and Dalvir Suri, when hyperlocal delivery was still a risky bet in India.

Despite its early promise, the company later struggled with funding shortages and leadership churn. Jha’s latest bet is on the global custom software development space, an industry projected to hit $146.2 billion by 2030 where he sees strong potential for disruption.

Emergent allows users to engage with its platform much like they would with a software engineer, using conversational prompts to design, tailor, and deploy complete applications spanning both front-end and back-end.  

Behind the scenes, a team of specialised AI agents code, test and launch, so it feels like the user have his own 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,” said Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed.

 It has worked with a jewellery store owner in Michigan who built an app to manage pricing across 50 stores and is now selling that app to others; a small business digitised wheelchair inventory tracking using photos and prompts; a person living with chronic pain built their own app to manage it better; and a UK-based founder of Indian origin created an EV marketplace app to serve a growing market.

The start-up claims that the product has already gained rapid adoption: in just 90 days, Emergent has surpassed $15 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and enabled over one million users to build more than 1.5 million apps.