Khosla Ventures, SoftBank in talks to invest in Emergent’s $60-million round

Co-Founders of Emergent Mukund Jha and Madhav Jha

Emergent, the vibe coding platform, is in advanced stages of raising over $60 million in a fresh round from Khosla Ventures, SoftBank and others, as investors continue to chase the artificial intelligence (AI) gold rush, sources told Moneycontrol.

The deal is being stitched together at a time when demand for agent-driven automation and task execution continues to grow.

The round, likely to be led by Khosla Ventures, “values the company at around $300 million, up sharply from earlier as it continues to scale”, one of the sources cited above said.

Emergent has an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $25 million within just four-and-a-half months of commercial launch, according to publicly available information, one of the fastest startups to reach that scale in such a short span of time. It was at about $15 million back in September.

The company has helped more than 2 million people ship apps without writing any code which has brought more users on its platform. Its user base is up from 1.5 million just two months ago.

Khosla Ventures, Emergent and SoftBank did not reply to Moneycontrol’s queries.

Once closed, the current round would be Emergent’s third funding round in as many months. The company, co-founded by twins Mukund and Madhav Jha, raised $23 million in its Series A round from Lightspeed, Prosus and others in September.

On December 9, Emergent announced it secured a strategic investment from Google AI Futures Fund (AIFF) but did not share deal details.

Moneycontrol was first to report on Emergent’s Seed round back in July 2024. The company raised around $7 million from Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham’s Together Fund, Y Combinator and others.

Angel investors Jeff Dean, Devendra Chaplot and Balaji Srinivasan are also investors in the company.

While this will be Emergent’s largest fundraise till date, the round is also important because it will mark SoftBank’s return to the Indian startup ecosystem. SoftBank has remained on the sidelines and largely done follow-on rounds to retain its stake in companies such as Meesho.

Emergent will be its first direct deal in a span of about two years.

Emergent is headquartered in San Francisco but has offices in Bengaluru, too. A majority of its team is based in India. The founders, the Jha brothers, are also Indians.

CEO Mukund is a Columbia Engineering graduate and former Google engineer who had also co-founded hyperlocal delivery startup Dunzo.  His brother, Madhav, is an ex-Amazon AI scientist and worked as a machine learning engineer at Dropbox before starting Emergent.

The startup, which launched three months ago, offers an AI-powered app builder that enables users to create production-ready web and mobile apps without writing code.

The platform handles backend infrastructure, logins, payments, deployment, and scaling, making it suitable for individuals, solopreneurs, and small business owners.

Emergent competes with Replit, Lovable and others. The company monetises through subscription plans ranging from $20 to $200 per month, with additional deployment fees. Users span 180 countries, with 20 percent in India and the rest in the US, the UK, and Europe.