AI Summit: Emergent growing faster than the fastest growing company I had seen before: Khosla Ventures’ founder Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures

AI vibe coding startup Emergent is doing phenomenally well and it is among the fastest growing companies ever seen, Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, one of the most marquee venture capital funds in the world, told Moneycontrol in an interview.

“Emergent is doing phenomenally well. It is one of the fastest growing companies I've ever seen. It is growing faster than the fastest company I'd seen before,” Khosla said in the interview on the sidelines of The India AI Impact Summit 2026 happening in New Delhi.

Emergent, which reportedly achieved an Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of $50 million on January 20, 2026, has seen its ARR double to $100 million in less than a month, as per Khosla.

Khosla Ventures led Emergent’s $70 million round in which SoftBank also participated, along with Prosus, Lightspeed and others, as first reported by Moneycontrol on December 11. 

Khosla Ventures, which has backed startups like Zetwerk, Sarvam AI and others in India.

Asked how the fund evaluates investments, especially in Indian companies, Khosla said: “Firstly, they have to be a great founder operating in a great market. Those are the only two things I look at. What's the market and how good the founder is. It doesn't matter which area they're in…we don't have rules.”

“There's a lot of opportunity in India,” he said. “We rely on entrepreneurs to reach out to us…we don’t source deals,” he added.

Khosla, also an investor in OpenAI and several other tech and AI companies around the world said he is not too concerned about which AI major is doing better than the other as all the companies will continue to co-exist.

“OpenAI is doing extremely well because they have great talent. All the major models will do well and they will leapfrog each other every few months,” he concluded.