In the last decade, as the camera quality of smartphones improved, platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok rose in popularity for photo and video sharing. Many people turned from casual posters to money-earning creators.
Emergent, a company built by twin brothers Mukund and Madhav Jha, aims to become a similar platform for consumers when it comes to app creation. The platform allows non-technical users to create an app using prompts.
While that’s not a unique pitch in 2025, Emergent intends to aid users through the app development process, while also managing different APIs and deployment steps so they don’t have to worry about various technicalities.
The startup said on Wednesday it has raised $23 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed, with participation from Y Combinator, Together (Founders of Freshworks’ Together Fund), and leading angels including former a16z GP Balaji Srinivasan, Google’s Jeff Dean, and Mistral founding team member Devendra Chaplo. The company has raised $30 million to date.
Mukund, who was CTO at Google-backed quick commerce startup Dunzo in India, left the company and went to the U.S. There, he started thinking about what he wanted to build with his brother Madhav, who worked at Dropbox.
“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 told TechCrunch over a call.
“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 twenty years.”
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Image Credits: Emergent
The company is clear that it doesn’t want to compete with developer-focused tools like Claude Code and Cursor, and wants to abstract the software development lifecycle for a non-technical user.
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