YC Root AccessEmergent: The AI App Builder for Everyone
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
25 min read · 5,392 words- 0:00 – 0:36
The AI Reset: A New Era of Building
- MUMukhund
I think AI is a big reset, right?
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Mm-hmm.
- MUMukhund
I feel that, like, uh, it's going to be-- the next 20 years is going to be about AI. It's just-- We're just getting started. I tell people that this is Bitcoin and dollar one right now. And so you should just be bold and, and, you know, uh, find a problem that you really like, and just go, go all in.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
[ on-hold music] Today I'm joined by Mukund and Madhav Jha, the founders of Emergent. Emergent recently announced a crazy $15 million ARR just three months after launch. Before diving into that story, let's get to learn about, uh, Emergent. Can you tell us more about what Emergent is doing?
- 0:36 – 1:02
What Emergent Is & How It Works
- MUMukhund
Great to be here. Uh, Emergent is an AI App Builder. Uh, we allow anybody, uh, without any programming knowledge to come on our app and build a mobile app, web apps, websites with zero coding knowledge. You come in, you prompt, and you get a full production-ready, uh, launchable apps, um, with us.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
So just describe what they want to do-
- MUMukhund
Yeah
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
... with a prompt.
- MUMukhund
Just come in this way. Yeah.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
You create the app.
- MUMukhund
Yes, yes.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Awesome. And can you tell us a little bit more of your scale? So we know $15 million ARR-
- MUMukhund
Yes
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
... in three months. Uh-
- MUMukhund
All right. So-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
How many
- 1:02 – 3:10
$15M ARR in 3 Months
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
apps?
- MUMukhund
So we launched three months back and have been growing pretty rapidly, probably one of the fastest growing, uh, AI startups right now in the world. Um, and we-- Uh, in three months, we have, like, roughly 1.7 million users on the platform. More than two and a half million apps have been built, uh, on the platform already. And, uh-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
That's insane
- MUMukhund
It's insane to see the-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
How many are actually live, like in prod, use it-- used every day?
- MUMukhund
Yeah, I mean, I think we, we don't, uh, have a good track 'cause a lot of people also deploy out-outside of our platform. We allow them to deploy on our platform, but roughly 20 to 30% people are able to deploy their apps on the platform today.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
That's awesome. Tell me more about like how did you come up with that idea? Like, you were two brothers, right?
- MUMukhund
Yeah. [chuckles] Yeah. So we are twin brothers. We actually, uh, got started-- We came to US to do our PhDs. Uh, and then I dropped out of the PhD program, joined Google.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
And you went back to India.
- MUMukhund
Yeah. I joined Google, then went back to India, started a company called Dunzo, which was one of the pioneers in quick commerce in the country.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
And that was with-- with Jack. How many employees did you have?
- MUMukhund
We had like-
- MJMadhav Jha
Several.
- MUMukhund
Yeah, become like-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Sh-
- MUMukhund
... two thousand employees-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Yeah
- MUMukhund
... but like eighty thousand delivery, delivery people on the ground. Um, yeah. And, uh, so September 23 is when I left, uh, Dunzo, came back to US, uh, spent some time with Maddy, and, uh, we were thinking what to do and, and that's when sort of, you know, we thought of Emergent. And Maddy-
- MJMadhav Jha
So I finished my PhD in Computer Science and then moved to the West Coast, and, uh, got the breeze of the West Coast for, for doing startup. So joined Zenefits as an early employee and saw the rise and fall of Zenefits to some extent.
- MUMukhund
Mm-hmm.
- MJMadhav Jha
Yeah, and then, uh, went and joined Amazon, uh, was part of the-- their deep learning platform team, uh, built their SageMaker platform. And, uh, yeah, like, uh, last year, me and Mukund connected, and so we, we, we've been wanting to do a startup for a long time. It just happened that-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
So is it to build together, like, as brothers? Like, is it a good thing or like-
- MJMadhav Jha
It's a lot of fun because-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
How much tension?
- MJMadhav Jha
Because we are very tight. We are very tight as twins. Uh, we are very close. And, uh, yeah.
- MUMukhund
I mean, we, we have spent hours just chatting about ideas. Like, every time we get free, we'll call each other and say, "Hey, I have a new idea." And, uh, so it's-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
So it's more like a dream come true than-
- MUMukhund
Totally. Totally.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
That's it.
- MUMukhund
It's finally-- and, you know, like, we've been meaning to do something together for a long time, and finally we got a chance. And, uh, I think the best part is that, you know, like, we, uh, in most ways, it's just either one of us need to be there, and because we, we sort of know, know each other, uh, really well. So there's-
- 3:10 – 4:46
Building Together as Twin Brothers
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
idea itself, because you did YC in summer of '24, right?
- MUMukhund
Yes.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
A little over a year ago. Uh, but you didn't start with this idea.
- MUMukhund
Right.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Tell us more about, like, the, the journey here.
- MUMukhund
Right. So when we came to YC, our first idea was, uh, that we wanted to build testing agents, which will-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Mm-hmm
- MUMukhund
... actually go and test your web app, mobile app. We thought browsing agents were getting really good, and can people just na-- in natural language prompt what they want to test? And, you know, our agents would go in and-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Yeah
- MUMukhund
... and test that. And from the beginning, we had this very, uh, strong belief that, you know, the AI exponentially is gonna continue, and you'll have a lot more autonomy, uh, a-a-and agents coming on. So even though at that point, like, copilots were, like, the popular trend, uh, a lot of people were building, uh, copilots. We were very focused on building agents which can do long-horizon tasks. Um, and when we started, like, we-- There were two, three things that's happened. One, like, we built out the entire tech and realized that, um, the general coding agent is a much bigger problem, uh, to solve, and we were a lot more excited by-- We felt that was a more ambitious idea that, that felt like something-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
I remember, like-
- MJMadhav Jha
[chuckles]
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
... it felt like that, kind of like when you were-
- MUMukhund
Yeah
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
... were speaking back then.
- MUMukhund
Yeah, I think we went back and forth on multiple things.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Yes.
- MUMukhund
And, and, and fr-finally, we were still trying to find our way in, you know, NYC when we were there to, to, to see what would work for us. And we felt the general coding agent is, is a much more ambitious idea with sort of, you know, something that we will be excited about the next 20 years building as-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Uh, but then you, you focused on more the enterprise market for a while.
- MUMukhund
Yeah. Initially, our focus was enterprise market. So we built, uh, uh, one of the world's best coding agent at that point, uh, this, this benchmark called SWE-bench. And I remember texting you that, "Hey, we, we, we, we are on number one on that benchmark now." So we returned to that benchmark. It took us, like, about a month, month and a half to, uh, you know, crack that and become number one in the world on that benchmark. And,
- 4:46 – 7:06
From Enterprise Agents to the App Builder
- MUMukhund
and during that phase, like, I think we did a lot of, like, uh, research work between me and Maddy to sort of really figure out what would work, agent, how do you build lo-long horizon.
- MJMadhav Jha
Yeah, I mean, even with an API access, that's-- there's a lot of things that goes behind making those API access work-
- MUMukhund
Yeah
- MJMadhav Jha
... for you in, in an agentic manner. Like, so you want the agent to have very autonom-autonomous work. And so one of the insights, early insights we had was that, uh, you want to give agent feedback and a very tight feedback loop. And so that was one of the genesis of Emergent, where we built all our infra in-house, right? So, uh, the entire, uh, infrastructure, be it like database, backend, everything, like, is built in-house. And, uh, that ensures we have a very tight feedback loop with the agent. And, uh, we did bun-bunch of other things around agents, like being-- make-making it multi, multi-agent tech and, and things like that.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
So you were-
- MJMadhav Jha
Yeah
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
... building all of that first for QA, then for enterprise.
- MJMadhav Jha
Right.
- MUMukhund
True.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
And by the time you went to consumers, like, kind of more of a consumer-facing, uh-
- MUMukhund
Yeah. So we, we went to-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
By building the app
- MUMukhund
... we went, we went to an enterprise and, and found the feedback cycle to be really slow.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Yeah.
- MUMukhund
And I think in the, in heart, like, we are very consumer as a, as a, as a, uh, you know, like, uh, personalities, we-- having been a consumer company before.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Yeah, Dunzo was pure consumer, right?
- MUMukhund
Dunzo was pure consumer company. And, uh, so it felt like, you know, like-Uh, we were getting too tied up in, in, you know, like enterprise cycle, and, um, and we-- So and we were internally building a lot of apps using Emergent already, right? And so we thought, okay, you know, like, why, why not just go directly to consumer.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
So in a way, like what you did for one year before launch is kind of what made you successful once you launched, kind of like you were more ready than ever.
- MUMukhund
Very much. I think, I think the foundation that we were able to set in the first like nine months of, you know, like just pure research-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Yeah
- MUMukhund
... on our agents, uh, and, uh, really g-got us, you know, like, um, really into the problem and, and helped us understand like how to build really good, uh, high quality agent. And, and that's what's driving a lot of our growth today. Like, when people come to the platform a-and they can see the difference between other platforms-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
So-
- MUMukhund
... that we are able to build better apps.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
That's cool. So let's speak about, about the product then. Uh, like, so after someone writes a prompt, what does happen in the-- like from the time they send-- click Enter-
- MUMukhund
Right
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
... what does the product do?
- MUMukhund
Yeah, so behind the scenes, as soon as you enter the prompt, right? Like we spin up a dev box kind of environment, which is a virtual machine, uh, in the cloud for, for the agent. So the hypothesis is that agent should basically get the same set of, uh, environment as, as a developer would get, right? And, uh, in that environment, agent is able to install libraries,
- 7:06 – 10:02
How Emergent Builds Apps from Prompts
- MUMukhund
you know, uh, write code and then like anytime it runs some, some, some, like, let's say, write some files, we automatically run some lint passes ar-around it to give feedback to it. Um, and, and so, I mean, actually I skipped a step where like we, we do, uh, first understand what the, what the human wants, right? Because people come from all walks of life, and so we first have to like do, uh... So one of the unique things we do is we first interact with the-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
See, you actually have like some conversation with the user-
- MUMukhund
Conversation with the-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
... before actually starting building
- MUMukhund
... before starting, and also based on the conversation, we realize where to route the right, uh, request, right? It may be that this person is mostly interested in a pure front-end side of things, or this person is more interested in, uh, you know, like via mobile apps or, or any of those things. Um-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
So, so today you are able to do both kind of like a web app, a mobile app, like different kind of, uh-
- MUMukhund
Yeah. We are the only vibe coding platform that supports web, mobile, backend-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Okay
- MUMukhund
... everything integrated in, in one place today.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Okay. And so you're going to route towards the right agent. It's different agents-
- MUMukhund
Yes
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
... depending on the tasks.
- MUMukhund
Yes.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
I mean, there is a, a lot of vibe coding tools-
- MUMukhund
Right, right
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
... out there. Like how do you, do you differentiate from them? Like what do you do differently?
- MUMukhund
Yeah, so I think the way we differentiate is that most, uh, platforms today like help you get a good prototype, right? So they'll give-- help you get, uh, front-end code really well. And, and, and our sort of goal has always been to take a user from an idea to a launched app that they can get usage on, get monetization done on that. And because we have, we have tightly coupled the infrastructure and, and a state-of-the-art coding agent and the product, like we've tightly built these things together. The overall experience of building, the overall quality of the app building is, is much higher on the platform because we have all the feedback loops tied up. We don't depend on third party for your backend databases, and that allows us to build really high quality apps on the platform.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
And, and you do anything differently, like to get to that level of production readiness?
- MUMukhund
Yeah. So, so I mean, at the heart of it is, is a multi-agent architecture that we have built, like where different specialized agent will come in and, and-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Like including testing and-
- MUMukhund
Including tests. So we, we do autonomous t-testing for you. We have a design agent that will come and design your app for you. We have a security agent when before deploying, it'll do security checks for you and, and then there's a deploying agent which will convert all of your build steps into, you know, infrastructure as a code and deploy them into, uh, into our, our cluster. And, and that really p- uh, gives like a very, uh, like unified experience to, to people to sort of, you know, build-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Awesome
- MUMukhund
... complex apps today.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
What would be the limits today? Kind of like-
- MUMukhund
Yeah, so today, like, I mean, typical-- I mean, line of code is a bad, uh, metric, but, uh, you know, that's one, one metric of complexity. So today, like we typically see the apps built are roughly thirty-five thousand, forty thousand, two thousand-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Okay
- MUMukhund
... line of code. Uh, most of the other platforms sort of cap out at like ten thousand, uh, ca- line of code.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Okay. So you think you are going beyond-
- MUMukhund
Beyond
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
... those platforms.
- 10:02 – 17:14
Builders from All Walks of Life
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
apps you can tell us about?
- MUMukhund
Yeah, so I mean, lots of apps. Like I think when we talk to users, this is one thing that we do a lot is, is speak to a lot of our users and understand what they're trying to build and where they're struggling and, and that sort of drives our roadmap. Um, there was this, uh, microbiologist, uh, who had this problem for ten years that she, uh, whenever she had an audiobook and she didn't like the narrator, she couldn't finish the book. So she built this entirely, completely new experience of audiobook, where she can import a book, select different, uh, narrators from Eleven Labs, uh, voice, and then export a completely new experience on the platform. There's this, this jewelry owner, um, and she had this problem where whenever somebody would walk into the store to, uh, ask for a jewelry repair, she had to flip through manual books to figure out the pricing. She built this AI pricing engine where she just takes a photo and, and it tells her what are the prices. Um, we had this gardener who built this entire SaaS app to manage admin user and, uh, gardener for job allocation, real-time location tracking. Um, so I think what, what's, what we are really enabling today is like, uh, entrepreneurs who want to start a new idea.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Mm-hmm.
- MUMukhund
Uh, that's, that's some-- one, one category that we see a lot, and small business owners who want to digitize their business, solve a, solve a problem. And we think the software's like need is very personal. Like everybody has a very personal need for software and, and we today allow them to build that.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
So like anyone who had a need to solve a problem one day-
- MUMukhund
Yes, and I think-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
... now is the time.
- MUMukhund
Yeah. We think, you know, when we launched, we thought like our product is gonna be largely used by semi-technical people, PMs, designers, but what, but we were surprised to see is that all walks of life, uh, you know, and lot, a lot of business people, a lot of like first time entrepreneurs are using us, uh, today.
- MJMadhav Jha
Yeah, today I was talking to some, like a couple of people who are in Spain, and they're filmmakers, and they are using our platform for like last three, four months. And they've built a-- Because they're arts-artsy people, they can bring their arts and-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Yeah
- MJMadhav Jha
... to it, and like the, the website that comes out is phenomenal. Like we, we looked at the website and we were like, "How did they build this?" Right? And they have no technical like coding background and, uh, yeah, pretty amazing to see.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
That's cool. How often do you speak with users? Like you have so many, you cannot speak to all of them.
- MUMukhund
Uh, no, we, we don't. I mean, we, we generally like... I mean, we do a lot of support, support ourselves, right? So I mean, whenever we see a support that looks interesting-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
You end up like speaking with these users.
- MUMukhund
Yeah.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Like the more-- the most demanding one is probably most-
- MJMadhav Jha
Most demanding one, something that catches our eye, you know, and like-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
That's cool
- MJMadhav Jha
... and people are very kind on, on Twitter as, as well.
- MUMukhund
I, I remember the first week we launched, like I was just stuck to my computer answering support tickets, uh, for-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Yeah
- MUMukhund
... for the first, you know, week and, and, uh-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Maybe let's speak about launching here because, uh, I mean, you got that crazy goals-
- MUMukhund
Right
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
... in just a few months, like, uh, and I think you started with an invite only period, right?
- MUMukhund
Right. Right. Right.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Can you tell us more about how you approached launching?
- MUMukhund
Yeah. So I think we, when, um, when we were aboutTo launch, uh, just before we, we ran like a very small alpha, right?
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Mm-hmm.
- MUMukhund
And, uh, just to test the part out. The-
- 17:14 – 19:54
Raising $23M and Scaling the Team
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Uh, speaking of money, you also recently announced a big Series A with LightSpeed, right?
- MUMukhund
Yes.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Like twenty-three million. Uh, when did that happen? Like, did you have already a lot of traction when, when you, uh, closed that round?
- MUMukhund
Uh, it, it actually got closed pretty quickly, like once we launched. Uh-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Like shortly after launch-
- MUMukhund
Shortly-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
... you had some traction
- MUMukhund
... two weeks, two weeks within the launch-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Okay
- MUMukhund
... like we were able to close that. Um, and we, we-- I think at two, two and a half, three million ARR when we sort of raised that.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Okay. So there was like, there was like some strong signal already that things were working really well.
- MUMukhund
Yeah, I think people tried our product and, and, and, you know, saw that our approach to, to problem-solving was very different. They-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Even the investors tried-
- MUMukhund
The investors, yes.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Okay.
- MUMukhund
And, and, uh-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
That's good to have a product that people can sensor.
- MUMukhund
I mean, that's the best thing. Like, you know, like when people tell us, we say, "Go try the platform." And you know, so-
- MJMadhav Jha
And you can also try the same prompt on multiple platforms.
- MUMukhund
Yes.
- MJMadhav Jha
And you'll, you'll-- you can easily tell, right, so which one is working better.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
So they're, they're, they're, they're feeling it, like their appreciation of the product was pretty high.
- MUMukhund
Yeah. Yeah.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
And that's what, uh-
- MUMukhund
Right. Yeah
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
... led you to a high Series D. That's, that's awesome. Uh, what are you going to do with the money?
- MUMukhund
Uh, so a lot of the investment is gonna go in just building a world-class team. We already have, you know-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Mm-hmm
- MUMukhund
... a really, really talent-dense team. Twelve engineers right now, and, and we're gonna just-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
You just have twelve engineers.
- 19:54 – 21:07
The Billion Builders Future
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Uh, I mean, a year ago none of that existed, right?
- MUMukhund
Yes. I mean, I, I mean, I feel like there'll be a billion builders-
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Mm-hmm
- MUMukhund
... uh, in, in the next couple of years, and we'll see this new explosion of ideas on, on the world. Great for YC because a lot of new entrepreneurs are gonna come online and, and, and build great things. And, and I, I think everybody has this desire. They have an idea in their mind that they want to explore, and, and I think truly platform like ours enable them to, uh, you know, break out.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Awesome. Any, uh, like parting advice for founders or aspiring founders?
- MUMukhund
I mean, firstly, like try Emergent because I think Emergent could really help you accelerate your, uh-
- MJMadhav Jha
Yeah, we have a lot of people-
- MUMukhund
... company building journey
- MJMadhav Jha
... from YC trying Emergent right now.
- MUMukhund
Yes.
- MJMadhav Jha
So like building their startup on, on Emergent.
- MUMukhund
Yeah, but I think in general I would say like I think AI is a big reset, right?
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Mm-hmm.
- MUMukhund
I feel that like, uh, it's going to be the next 20 years is going to be about AI. It's just, we're just getting started. I tell people that this is Bitcoin and dollar one right now. And so you should just be bold and, and, you know, uh, find a problem that you really like and just go, go all in.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
That's awesome. Mukund, Madhav, it was great to have you with us today.
- MUMukhund
Oh, thank you so much.
- NDNicolas Dessaigne
Thanks for sharing your story.
- MJMadhav Jha
Yeah.
- MUMukhund
Great to be here. Thank you. [outro music]
Episode duration: 21:07
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