Bengaluru-based startup Emergent, founded by twin brothers Mukund Jha and Madhav Jha, has raised $23 million in a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed, with participation from Y Combinator, Together Fund, and angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan, Google’s Jeff Dean, and Devendra Chaplot of Mistral. With this round, the company has secured $30 million in total funding to date. The fresh capital will fuel Emergent’s mission to revolutionize app development for non-technical users, making it as intuitive as content creation on platforms like Instagram and YouTube.
The platform enables anyone to build apps using simple prompts, while it seamlessly manages APIs, deployment, and other backend processes. By abstracting away the complexities of software engineering, Emergent seeks to empower a new wave of app creators without coding expertise.
Mukund, formerly the CTO at Dunzo, and Madhav, who worked at Dropbox, were inspired to build Emergent after closely observing the rapid advances in AI-powered coding. “Both of us are very technical, and we have been into programming since we were 12. Late in 2023, we spent time with people at different AI labs, and we realized AI-powered coding is going to take off given how much effort they were allocating to get coding data right,” Mukund shared in a conversation with TechCrunch.
The brothers emphasize that the future of development lies in intelligent, agent-driven systems. “We had a strong belief in powerful agents coming online. But we felt that given AI’s development trajectory, agent-based app development is going to be a huge part of the economy, and we felt that was the problem we wanted to solve for the next 20 years,” Mukund explained.
By combining deep technical expertise with an accessible, user-friendly interface, Emergent is positioning itself as a pioneer in agentic app creation. With growing investor confidence and strong industry backing, the startup is set to accelerate its vision of democratizing app development and redefining how software is built in the AI era.
