Emergent raises $23M from Lightspeed to let consumers build apps | TechCrunch

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 Chaplot. 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 20 years.”

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.

Mukund said that the company has built infrastructure chops from the ground up to support app development. He added that non-technical users might not want to know what an error in a code means, so it has developed AI agents to look for errors in the app and fix them.

I tested the app by building a vaccine and medicine tracker for my pets. While I started with a simple prompt, the agent asked a lot of questions about what kind of pets I wanted to add, if the app was for multiple people or just me, how I would like reminders to be scheduled, and a bunch of other options. It also added screens like a dashboard and an easy way to add pets and vaccinations, even though I didn’t specify it.

The whole process of building and auto-testing the app took me less than half an hour, and I got a satisfactory first version of the app out of it. A lot of other vibe coding apps I have tried have failed to generate apps for their own pre-generated prompts. Emergent does have a bit of an edge there.

Mukund said that more than 1 million people have built over 1.5 million apps since the tool’s launch last year. People are eager to try vibe coding apps as an experiment, but tools will also have to make users stay with the platform and maintain the apps. The company said that since it also takes care of deployment and back-end infrastructure, it is easier to maintain apps for people.

Right now, the startup is using Expo as a mobile client to deploy mobile apps, but it said that soon it will be launching its own mobile app to natively build apps. To integrate different platforms, it also uses a universal API key with shared usage that saves users from having to create accounts for different services or model providers.

At face value, vibe coding apps claim that you can build apps without any technical experience. Despite that, when you start building an app, you encounter technical terms and systems. The company said that it wants to educate users on technical topics, such as what is an API and how to choose different components, such as an email-sending mechanism.

Emergent is also building a brainstorming mode for new users who might have an idea but wouldn’t know the final shape of their app. This new mode will help them navigate the ideation stage.

For an app economy to become sustainable, developers want other users to discover their apps and get paid in the process as well. Right now, Emergent shows some apps on its home page, but that is about it. Developers can integrate a payment option like Stripe, but they have to bring their own API key. Going forward, Emergent wants to make both discovery and monetization easier.

Emergent has a lot of competition in the space. Startups like Canva and Figma, along with browsers like Perplexity, Comet, and Opera Neon, are nudging users to write mini apps. Multiple startups are working on vibe coding solutions that cater to a largely non-technical audience, including Seven Seven Six-backed Vibecode and Rocket, fresh out of an Accel-backed $15 million Series A funding round.

Hemant Mohapatra, a partner at Lightspeed, said that the venture firm was looking for a startup with deep technical expertise in bringing app-making capabilities to the masses, and Emergent performed above expectations in its testing.

“One of the biggest roadblocks for participating in the digital economy is the ability to code. We wanted to invest in a company that brings the capability bar [for being able to code] next to zero, so [appmaking] becomes a function of intent,” Mohapatra told TechCrunch over a call.

He noted that Emergent stood out from others because the platform enables the post-development lifecycle of deployment, sharing, bug fixing, and support with AI.