In the span of a single year, a startup founded by twin brothers has done what most companies can only dream of: hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue in just eight months, attract backing from SoftBank and Khosla Ventures, and put 7 million production applications into the hands of 6 million users across 190 countries.
Emergent (emergent.sh) is an AI-powered full-stack development platform that lets anyone build production-ready web and mobile applications by describing their idea in natural language. It is at the forefront of the “vibe coding” movement — the practice of using AI agents to generate, test, and deploy software with minimal human intervention. Collins Dictionary named “vibe coding” its Word of 2025, and Emergent has become one of its most visible champions.
What Is Emergent?
Emergent is not a traditional low-code platform or a visual drag-and-drop builder. Rather, it is an autonomous AI engineering team that fits in a browser tab. A user describes what they want to build — for example, “a SaaS dashboard for tracking subscription revenue with Stripe billing” — and a coordinated system of specialized AI agents handles the rest.
The platform employs multiple AI agents that work in sequence:
- Planning Agent translates the user’s natural language description into a structured project specification, defining architecture, data models, and user flows.
- Frontend Agent generates responsive user interfaces using React for web applications and React Native with Expo for mobile apps.
- Backend Agent creates server-side logic, RESTful APIs, and database schemas (PostgreSQL and MongoDB supported).
- Testing Agent runs automated quality checks, identifies bugs, and reports issues back to the system.
- Deployment Agent handles hosting, SSL certificates, environment configuration, and publishing.
The entire process runs autonomously. Users can review and edit the generated code using an in-browser IDE that mirrors VS Code, but they do not need to write a single line unless they choose to. All generated code belongs to the user and can be exported to GitHub with full commit history.
From Natural Language to Production
What sets Emergent apart from earlier no-code platforms is the depth of what it produces. A single session can generate:
- A complete frontend with authentication flows, dashboards, and responsive layouts.
- A backend with database models, API endpoints, and business logic.
- Integrated payment processing through Stripe for monetization.
- One-click deployment with managed hosting, custom domains, and SSL.
- Mobile app versions for iOS and Android via React Native.
The platform also includes built-in security scanning that checks generated code for vulnerabilities before deployment, and an autonomous debugging capability that fixes issues and redeploys without manual intervention.
The Founders: Mukund Jha and Madhav Jha
Emergent was founded in 2024 by twin brothers Mukund Jha and Madhav Jha, who bring complementary expertise from big tech and startup environments.
Mukund Jha (Chief Executive Officer) previously co-founded Dunzo, the Indian quick-commerce startup, and worked at Google. He brings deep experience in scaling consumer platforms. Madhav Jha (Chief Technology Officer) worked as a machine learning researcher at Amazon and later at Dropbox. Together, they identified an opportunity to radically reduce the cost and complexity of software development.
Their insight was simple but powerful: if AI models could already write code snippets and answer programming questions, why not chain those capabilities into an autonomous system that could build entire applications from start to finish? And why limit that capability to professional developers when most of the world has ideas but lacks coding skills?
Explosive Growth and Record-Breaking ARR
Emergent’s growth trajectory has been remarkable by any standard. Launched in June 2025, the platform hit $50 million in annualized revenue within seven months. By February 2026, that number had doubled to $100 million ARR — a pace that places it among the fastest-growing software companies in history.
The user base tells a similar story. Approximately 6 million users across 190 countries have built over 7 million applications on the platform. Crucially, 70 percent of users are non-developers with no prior coding experience. Another 40 percent are small and medium businesses digitizing their operations. The United States and Europe account for roughly 70 percent of revenue, with strong adoption across India, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
Emergent also counts more than 150,000 paying customers in 90 countries, a figure that continues to grow as the platform expands its enterprise capabilities.
The Economics of AI-Native Development
One of the most dramatic shifts Emergent enables is the cost of building software. Traditional custom software development projects can cost $500,000 or more when accounting for planning, design, frontend engineering, backend engineering, testing, and deployment. Emergent claims users can build equivalent applications for between $1,000 and $5,000 in platform credits, representing a reduction of two orders of magnitude.
This cost compression has implications beyond individual projects. At scale, it suggests that the marginal cost of creating a new software application is approaching near zero — a dynamic that could unlock an entirely new category of micro-SaaS products, internal tools, and experimental applications that would never have been economically viable under traditional development models.
Funding: $100 Million and Climbing
Investors have taken notice. Emergent has raised over $100 million to date across multiple rounds:
- Seed Round (2025): $7 million from Y Combinator and Together Fund.
- Series A (September 2025): $23 million led by Lightspeed, with participation from Prosus, Y Combinator, and angel investors including Jeff Dean and Balaji Srinivasan.
- Strategic Investment (December 2025): An undisclosed amount from Google’s AI Futures Fund, signaling Google’s interest in AI-powered development tools.
- Series B (January 2026): $70 million led by Khosla Ventures and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from existing investors Prosus, Lightspeed, Together, and Y Combinator. The round valued Emergent at approximately $300 million.
In April 2026, reports emerged that Emergent is in talks to raise a Series C of $200 million to $250 million led by Creaegis, which would value the company at approximately $1.5 billion — a fivefold increase in valuation within months.
Pricing Tiers
Emergent offers four pricing tiers designed to accommodate different user profiles:
| Plan | Monthly Price | Annual Price | Credits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 10 credits |
| Standard | $20 | $204/year | 100 credits |
| Pro | $200 | $2,004/year | 750 credits |
| Team | $250 | Custom | Shared pool |
The free tier gives new users a risk-free way to explore the platform. Standard and Pro plans add increasing numbers of credits for building and deploying applications, while the Team plan provides a shared credit pool for organizations and includes enterprise features.
Building Mobile Apps from a Phone
In February 2026, Emergent launched its mobile application on both the iOS App Store and Google Play, enabling a user experience that previously seemed far-fetched: building full-stack mobile applications entirely from a smartphone.
The mobile app supports voice input — users can say “Build me a restaurant reservation app with payment processing” and the AI agents begin work immediately. Built apps can be previewed in real time via Expo Go, iterated on the go, and published directly to the Apple App Store and Google Play. More than 10,000 mobile applications were built during early access testing alone.
The mobile app also syncs seamlessly with the desktop platform, allowing users to start a project on their phone during a commute and continue refining it on a laptop later.
Enterprise and Security Features
Recognizing that adoption extends beyond individual builders to organizations, Emergent has added enterprise-grade features:
- Single sign-on (SSO) integration.
- Role-based access control (RBAC) for team projects.
- Full data isolation and project-level permissions.
- Compliance-ready deployment configurations.
- Automated security vulnerability scanning before every deployment.
These features have made Emergent increasingly attractive to mid-market companies and larger organizations looking to accelerate internal tool development without adding engineering headcount.
ISE 2026: Expanding into Broadcast and Virtual Production
In a notable expansion beyond traditional software development, Emergent used ISE 2026 in Barcelona to launch two new AI-powered products aimed at the broadcast and virtual production industries.
Pulsar VS is an AI-powered virtual production solution that generates infinite virtual environments from a single text prompt, producing scenes comparable to Unreal Engine quality. It works with any camera tracking system and offers intuitive playout control without requiring deep technical expertise.
Nova GFX is an AI broadcast graphics platform that automatically transforms any data feed — sports scores, financial data, election results, social media — into broadcast-ready visuals. It includes an AI-automated template builder, AI agents for data integration, and real-time image generation capabilities.
These products signal Emergent’s ambition to extend its AI-native approach beyond web and mobile applications into media production, a sector that has traditionally required specialized skills and expensive hardware.
The Vibe Coding Movement
Emergent is widely credited as a driving force behind the “vibe coding” movement, a term popularized by Google CEO Sundar Pichai that describes a new paradigm in which developers (and non-developers) describe what they want in natural language and let AI agents handle implementation.
Collins Dictionary named “vibe coding” its Word of 2025, reflecting the broader cultural shift toward AI-assisted creation. For Emergent, this cultural tailwind has translated directly into user growth and market adoption. The platform has been featured extensively in outlets including Forbes India, CNBC TV18, and eWEEK, each highlighting different aspects of its rapid ascent.
What the Critics Say
The platform is not without its skeptics. Security researchers have noted that AI-generated code can contain vulnerabilities if not properly reviewed, and the speed of development can outpace an organization’s ability to audit what has been produced. Others question whether applications built entirely by AI agents can match the maintainability and architectural coherence of software designed by experienced engineers.
Emergent has responded by investing in automated security scanning, providing full source code access and GitHub integration, and positioning the platform as a complement to — rather than a replacement for — professional software engineering.
What Emergent Means for the Future of Software
If Emergent’s trajectory continues, the implications extend well beyond a single company. A world in which anyone can describe an application and have it built, tested, deployed, and monetized within hours changes the economics of software fundamentally.
The 6 million users on Emergent today have already built 7 million applications — a ratio of more than one app per user that suggests the platform is enabling rapid experimentation and iteration. As AI models continue to improve and the cost of generation continues to fall, the question shifts from “can AI build software?” to “what software should we build?”
Emergent’s answer, so far, is anything you can describe.
