It was not long ago that building a sophisticated app required a team of experienced programmers hovering over their keyboards. Now, AI has made it possible for a novice with no coding knowledge to whip up high-quality apps from scratch.
Emergent, founded out of Y Combinator’s startup class of 2024 by twin brothers Mukund Jha and Madhav Jha, is one of the fastest-growing so-called “vibe coding” platforms, already boasting 5 million users and seeing annual recurring revenue soar from $50 million to $5 million in a little over a year.
The company recently raised $70 million in Series B funding from Khosla Ventures and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from Prosus, Lightspeed, Together, and Y Combinator. The valuation was not disclosed.
“Emergent is growing at a pace we rarely see because it is tapping into a segment that has never been served,” Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, said in a statement. “When barriers to software creation fall this quickly, behavior changes across industries, not just within the technology sector. Emergent is early in shaping how software gets created and monetized over the next decade, not just the next product cycle, and its users are quick to share their success.”
In a sign of how quickly the hottest AI companies are raising funding in this bull market, it was only three months ago that Emergent raised $23 million in Series A funding.
“There’s this huge gap in the market where people are looking for an alternative that can build fast, cheap, and high-quality software, Mukund Jha, Emergent’s CEO, said in an interview. “Because the product is really resonating with users, we are seeing this explosive growth.”
A standard individual subscription is $17 a month, while a Pro account goes for $167 a month.
Jha says 80% of users have never seen a line of code before. Most are small business owners, such as a factory owner in Mexico who built a system to manage his plant.
“They were able to create this whole setup on their own and have 500 factory workers using it on a daily basis,” Jha said. “We also had a microbiologist build a whole new audiobook experience where she can import voices from ElevenLabs and create a completely new listening experience to the audiobooks.”
Vibe coding is a crowded space for startups, and Emergent faces competition from Lovable, a Swedish vibe coding app that raised $330 million in Series B funding at a $6.6 billion valuation in December. There is also Replit, which is reportedly raising funding at a $9 billion valuation.
Asked about his competitors, Jha said: “A lot of the other platforms, they’re great for prototyping, they’re great for demos, but when it comes to really managing the entire lifecycle of software development, they fall short. That’s a gap we are trying to fill in the market right now.”
