Emergent Launches Vibe Coding Platform After $23M Raise

When a funding round has interest from Google and Thinking Machines, you may be thinking it’s a firm that has good vibes.

Emergent has raised $23 million in Series A funding as it moves to expand a platform designed to make software creation accessible to people without technical backgrounds.

The round was led by Lightspeed, with participation from YC, Together, Prosus, and a slate of prominent AI angel investors. Among those named were Jeff Dean (Google), Devendra Chaplot (Thinking Machines), Siqi Chen (Runway), Srinivasan Venkatachary (Google Deepmind), Prasanna (Rippling), Edo Liberty (Pinecone), and Balaji Srinivasan. The new financing brings Emergent’s total funding to $30 million, including a $7 million seed round.

“My brother [Madhav, CTO] and I built Emergent to equip anyone with an idea and a phone to create software affordably,” said Mukund Jha, Co-founder and CEO of Emergent.

Emergent is building what it calls a “vibe coding” platform, centered on autonomous AI agents that can generate full-stack, production-ready applications. By the way, Google has already added vibe coding to Gemini.

Back to Emergent. It says the goal is to empower more individuals to build and run businesses by removing long-standing barriers to software development, including the need for programming expertise, significant upfront capital, or a technical co-founder.

The announcement arrives as AI-assisted development tools continue to move rapidly from supporting professional engineering teams toward enabling non-technical users. That shift could have broad implications for entrepreneurship, the competitive landscape of software, and job security. Particularly if platforms like Emergent succeed in making custom applications easy enough to create and maintain for people who previously relied on spreadsheets, off-the-shelf SaaS tools, or manual processes.

Positioning in a crowded AI builder market

Emergent is entering a fast-growing category that includes no-code and low-code platforms, but the company is positioning itself as something closer to an “AI development team in the cloud.” Rather than requiring users to assemble workflows from prebuilt components, Emergent says its autonomous agents can handle the end-to-end creation of a working application, including both the front-end user experience and back-end infrastructure.

In practice, Emergent says this means a user can start with an idea and receive a functioning application “from day one,” with core elements such as servers, user authentication, payments, and scaling handled automatically. The company claims the agent system can code, test, and launch apps while also detecting and fixing issues, working across extended sessions, and retaining memory of what a user is building.

A bet on entrepreneurs and small businesses

Emergent is explicitly targeting small business owners, aspiring founders, and creators who may not have access to engineering talent. The company is leaning heavily on the idea that many potential businesses never reach market because software development has historically required either technical capability or enough financial resources to hire developers.

The company cited a broad entrepreneurial appetite as justification for its approach, pointing to the idea that “Three in four Americans have considered starting a business.” Emergent’s argument is that even when demand exists, the pathway from idea to product has typically been too costly or too complex for most people to navigate. By collapsing that complexity, the platform aims to shift who can build software in the first place—and who profits from it.

If that promise holds, the implications could extend beyond personal side projects. Custom software has long been a competitive advantage for larger companies that could afford dedicated technical teams. Bringing similar capability to smaller organizations could allow niche businesses to build specialized tools tailored to their operations, while also creating opportunities for small operators to productize those tools and sell them into their industries.

Early use cases

Emergent says its platform is already being used at meaningful scale, reporting “over a million people building more than a million and a half apps and counting.” The examples the company highlighted focus less on consumer social apps and more on practical business needs and personal problem-solving.

One example involved a jewelry store owner in Michigan who built an app to standardize repair pricing across 50 store locations. Emergent said she is now selling the software to other jewelry stores, illustrating how internal workflow tools can become commercial products.

Growth claims

Alongside the funding announcement, Emergent also said it has reached more than $15 million in annual recurring revenue within 90 days of launch, positioning the company as one of the fastest-growing startups.

If accurate, that would suggest strong early demand for tools that let non-technical users build software products quickly, especially during a period when businesses are searching for ways to automate operations without adding headcount.

Emergent’s rise reflects a larger shift in the software economy: the steady movement from “software is built by engineers” to “software is built by anyone with a problem to solve.”

Let’s see if the good times and good vibes continue.

Replit has unveiled its Mobile Apps feature, allowing creators to build and publish Apple device applications using nothing but plain English descriptions.

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