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Emergent: The AI App Builder for Everyone

Emergent is building the next generation of app development, where anyone can create software with natural language. The platform lets users describe what they want, and Emergent’s AI builds it — from web apps to automations to tools used by millions. In this interview with YC Partner Nicolas Dessaigne, co-founders Mukhund and Madhav Jha share how they scaled to $15M ARR in just three months, what inspired them to make app creation accessible to everyone, and how they see a future where building software is as easy as having an idea. Chapters: 00:00 – The AI Reset: A New Era of Building 00:36 – What Emergent Is & How It Works 01:02 – $15M ARR in 3 Months 03:10 – Building Together as Twin Brothers 04:46 – From Enterprise Agents to the App Builder 07:06 – How Emergent Builds Apps from Prompts 10:02 – Builders from All Walks of Life 17:14 – Raising $23M and Scaling the Team 19:54 – The Billion Builders Future

MukhundguestNicolas DessaignehostMadhav Jhaguest
Oct 16, 202521mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:000:36

    The AI Reset: A New Era of Building

    1. MU

      I think AI is a big reset, right?

    2. ND

      Mm-hmm.

    3. MU

      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.

    4. ND

      [ 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?

  2. 0:361:02

    What Emergent Is & How It Works

    1. MU

      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.

    2. ND

      So just describe what they want to do-

    3. MU

      Yeah

    4. ND

      ... with a prompt.

    5. MU

      Just come in this way. Yeah.

    6. ND

      You create the app.

    7. MU

      Yes, yes.

    8. ND

      Awesome. And can you tell us a little bit more of your scale? So we know $15 million ARR-

    9. MU

      Yes

    10. ND

      ... in three months. Uh-

    11. MU

      All right. So-

    12. ND

      How many

  3. 1:023:10

    $15M ARR in 3 Months

    1. ND

      apps?

    2. MU

      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-

    3. ND

      That's insane

    4. MU

      It's insane to see the-

    5. ND

      How many are actually live, like in prod, use it-- used every day?

    6. MU

      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.

    7. ND

      That's awesome. Tell me more about like how did you come up with that idea? Like, you were two brothers, right?

    8. MU

      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.

    9. ND

      And you went back to India.

    10. MU

      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.

    11. ND

      And that was with-- with Jack. How many employees did you have?

    12. MU

      We had like-

    13. MJ

      Several.

    14. MU

      Yeah, become like-

    15. ND

      Sh-

    16. MU

      ... two thousand employees-

    17. ND

      Yeah

    18. MU

      ... 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-

    19. MJ

      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.

    20. MU

      Mm-hmm.

    21. MJ

      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-

    22. ND

      So is it to build together, like, as brothers? Like, is it a good thing or like-

    23. MJ

      It's a lot of fun because-

    24. ND

      How much tension?

    25. MJ

      Because we are very tight. We are very tight as twins. Uh, we are very close. And, uh, yeah.

    26. MU

      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-

    27. ND

      So it's more like a dream come true than-

    28. MU

      Totally. Totally.

    29. ND

      That's it.

    30. MU

      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-

  4. 3:104:46

    Building Together as Twin Brothers

    1. ND

      idea itself, because you did YC in summer of '24, right?

    2. MU

      Yes.

    3. ND

      A little over a year ago. Uh, but you didn't start with this idea.

    4. MU

      Right.

    5. ND

      Tell us more about, like, the, the journey here.

    6. MU

      Right. So when we came to YC, our first idea was, uh, that we wanted to build testing agents, which will-

    7. ND

      Mm-hmm

    8. MU

      ... 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-

    9. ND

      Yeah

    10. MU

      ... 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-

    11. ND

      I remember, like-

    12. MJ

      [chuckles]

    13. ND

      ... it felt like that, kind of like when you were-

    14. MU

      Yeah

    15. ND

      ... were speaking back then.

    16. MU

      Yeah, I think we went back and forth on multiple things.

    17. ND

      Yes.

    18. MU

      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-

    19. ND

      Uh, but then you, you focused on more the enterprise market for a while.

    20. MU

      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,

  5. 4:467:06

    From Enterprise Agents to the App Builder

    1. MU

      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.

    2. MJ

      Yeah, I mean, even with an API access, that's-- there's a lot of things that goes behind making those API access work-

    3. MU

      Yeah

    4. MJ

      ... 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.

    5. ND

      So you were-

    6. MJ

      Yeah

    7. ND

      ... building all of that first for QA, then for enterprise.

    8. MJ

      Right.

    9. MU

      True.

    10. ND

      And by the time you went to consumers, like, kind of more of a consumer-facing, uh-

    11. MU

      Yeah. So we, we went to-

    12. ND

      By building the app

    13. MU

      ... we went, we went to an enterprise and, and found the feedback cycle to be really slow.

    14. ND

      Yeah.

    15. MU

      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.

    16. ND

      Yeah, Dunzo was pure consumer, right?

    17. MU

      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.

    18. ND

      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.

    19. MU

      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-

    20. ND

      Yeah

    21. MU

      ... 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-

    22. ND

      So-

    23. MU

      ... that we are able to build better apps.

    24. ND

      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-

    25. MU

      Right

    26. ND

      ... what does the product do?

    27. MU

      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,

  6. 7:0610:02

    How Emergent Builds Apps from Prompts

    1. MU

      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-

    2. ND

      See, you actually have like some conversation with the user-

    3. MU

      Conversation with the-

    4. ND

      ... before actually starting building

    5. MU

      ... 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-

    6. ND

      So, so today you are able to do both kind of like a web app, a mobile app, like different kind of, uh-

    7. MU

      Yeah. We are the only vibe coding platform that supports web, mobile, backend-

    8. ND

      Okay

    9. MU

      ... everything integrated in, in one place today.

    10. ND

      Okay. And so you're going to route towards the right agent. It's different agents-

    11. MU

      Yes

    12. ND

      ... depending on the tasks.

    13. MU

      Yes.

    14. ND

      I mean, there is a, a lot of vibe coding tools-

    15. MU

      Right, right

    16. ND

      ... out there. Like how do you, do you differentiate from them? Like what do you do differently?

    17. MU

      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.

    18. ND

      And, and you do anything differently, like to get to that level of production readiness?

    19. MU

      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-

    20. ND

      Like including testing and-

    21. MU

      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-

    22. ND

      Awesome

    23. MU

      ... complex apps today.

    24. ND

      What would be the limits today? Kind of like-

    25. MU

      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-

    26. ND

      Okay

    27. MU

      ... line of code. Uh, most of the other platforms sort of cap out at like ten thousand, uh, ca- line of code.

    28. ND

      Okay. So you think you are going beyond-

    29. MU

      Beyond

    30. ND

      ... those platforms.

  7. 10:0217:14

    Builders from All Walks of Life

    1. ND

      apps you can tell us about?

    2. MU

      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.

    3. ND

      Mm-hmm.

    4. MU

      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.

    5. ND

      So like anyone who had a need to solve a problem one day-

    6. MU

      Yes, and I think-

    7. ND

      ... now is the time.

    8. MU

      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.

    9. MJ

      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-

    10. ND

      Yeah

    11. MJ

      ... 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.

    12. ND

      That's cool. How often do you speak with users? Like you have so many, you cannot speak to all of them.

    13. MU

      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-

    14. ND

      You end up like speaking with these users.

    15. MU

      Yeah.

    16. ND

      Like the more-- the most demanding one is probably most-

    17. MJ

      Most demanding one, something that catches our eye, you know, and like-

    18. ND

      That's cool

    19. MJ

      ... and people are very kind on, on Twitter as, as well.

    20. MU

      I, I remember the first week we launched, like I was just stuck to my computer answering support tickets, uh, for-

    21. ND

      Yeah

    22. MU

      ... for the first, you know, week and, and, uh-

    23. ND

      Maybe let's speak about launching here because, uh, I mean, you got that crazy goals-

    24. MU

      Right

    25. ND

      ... in just a few months, like, uh, and I think you started with an invite only period, right?

    26. MU

      Right. Right. Right.

    27. ND

      Can you tell us more about how you approached launching?

    28. MU

      Yeah. So I think we, when, um, when we were aboutTo launch, uh, just before we, we ran like a very small alpha, right?

    29. ND

      Mm-hmm.

    30. MU

      And, uh, just to test the part out. The-

  8. 17:1419:54

    Raising $23M and Scaling the Team

    1. ND

      Uh, speaking of money, you also recently announced a big Series A with LightSpeed, right?

    2. MU

      Yes.

    3. ND

      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?

    4. MU

      Uh, it, it actually got closed pretty quickly, like once we launched. Uh-

    5. ND

      Like shortly after launch-

    6. MU

      Shortly-

    7. ND

      ... you had some traction

    8. MU

      ... two weeks, two weeks within the launch-

    9. ND

      Okay

    10. MU

      ... 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.

    11. ND

      Okay. So there was like, there was like some strong signal already that things were working really well.

    12. MU

      Yeah, I think people tried our product and, and, and, you know, saw that our approach to, to problem-solving was very different. They-

    13. ND

      Even the investors tried-

    14. MU

      The investors, yes.

    15. ND

      Okay.

    16. MU

      And, and, uh-

    17. ND

      That's good to have a product that people can sensor.

    18. MU

      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-

    19. MJ

      And you can also try the same prompt on multiple platforms.

    20. MU

      Yes.

    21. MJ

      And you'll, you'll-- you can easily tell, right, so which one is working better.

    22. ND

      So they're, they're, they're, they're feeling it, like their appreciation of the product was pretty high.

    23. MU

      Yeah. Yeah.

    24. ND

      And that's what, uh-

    25. MU

      Right. Yeah

    26. ND

      ... led you to a high Series D. That's, that's awesome. Uh, what are you going to do with the money?

    27. MU

      Uh, so a lot of the investment is gonna go in just building a world-class team. We already have, you know-

    28. ND

      Mm-hmm

    29. MU

      ... a really, really talent-dense team. Twelve engineers right now, and, and we're gonna just-

    30. ND

      You just have twelve engineers.

  9. 19:5421:07

    The Billion Builders Future

    1. ND

      Uh, I mean, a year ago none of that existed, right?

    2. MU

      Yes. I mean, I, I mean, I feel like there'll be a billion builders-

    3. ND

      Mm-hmm

    4. MU

      ... 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.

    5. ND

      Awesome. Any, uh, like parting advice for founders or aspiring founders?

    6. MU

      I mean, firstly, like try Emergent because I think Emergent could really help you accelerate your, uh-

    7. MJ

      Yeah, we have a lot of people-

    8. MU

      ... company building journey

    9. MJ

      ... from YC trying Emergent right now.

    10. MU

      Yes.

    11. MJ

      So like building their startup on, on Emergent.

    12. MU

      Yeah, but I think in general I would say like I think AI is a big reset, right?

    13. ND

      Mm-hmm.

    14. MU

      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.

    15. ND

      That's awesome. Mukund, Madhav, it was great to have you with us today.

    16. MU

      Oh, thank you so much.

    17. ND

      Thanks for sharing your story.

    18. MJ

      Yeah.

    19. MU

      Great to be here. Thank you. [outro music]

Episode duration: 21:07

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