India’s Fastest Growing AI Startup

So I think now we are just truly seeing this unlock where people who, who were, like, really close to problem, domain expert and-- but have been blocked by, you know, technology barrier to sort of really express themselves are using Emergent to sort of build these things out.

There's just so much focus on AI is gonna replace jobs, knowledge work is going away. Like, what's that gonna mean for employment and civil unrest? But [chuckles] like no one's really talking about the fact that actually, like, if you have, like, some agency of interest and you want to start your own business and have autonomy over your life, like, you are empowering that at scale. [upbeat music] Welcome back to another episode of The Lightcone. Uh, unfortunately, Garry got called to jury duty and can't be w- here with us today. Uh, but we are really excited to be joined by Mukund and Madhav Jha. Uh, they're both twin brothers and founders of Emergent, which went through YC in summer 2024. Emergent's a platform that lets anyone build and ship production-ready software using AI agents. You guys are actually one of the fastest-growing companies I believe YC's ever funded. Um, I mean, the statistics you were telling us were mind-blowing. You have, in eight months since launch, seven million apps have been built with Emergent. Walk us through this, like, incredible growth you're seeing, actually. When did that hit a real inflection point, and how did that, that feel for you guys?

So we-- Both are twin brothers. We actually, uh, you know, started programming when we were age twelve. Both of us came to US to do our PhDs. I dropped out of the PhD program, joined Google, and Maddy went on to, um... Was at Zenefits, then went on, uh, to start the deep learning team at Amazon. And, uh, we've been meaning to do a startup together for a long time. And, um, before this, I was, uh, running a startup in India called Dunzo, which was a hyperlocal quick commerce company. Um-

Dunzo was a big company, actually, right?

Yeah, it, it was, it was really big. Uh, and, and we... We are almost a verb in India. So when people ship something, they say, "Dunzo it." Uh, and, uh, and I was managing a really large team of three hundred engineers, um, and, you know, and we have been sort of watching the deep learning field for a while, and we knew an inflection point is coming. One of the things that I observed when I was running this large engineering team was that software testing was the biggest bottleneck in shipping fast. Um, so when we started looking at, you know, what we want to build in AI, uh, that was the first idea we actually-

What year was this?

This was '23 end.

Okay.

Yeah. And, and so when we applied to YC, like, we applied with this idea of automating software testing. Uh, that was the first idea. In fact, we went to a lot of VCs with this idea. They thought it was too crazy. Uh, you know, and, and now looking back, it, it, it almost looks, uh, funny. And so we applied to YC with this idea, and, um, and when we were building this testing agents, we, uh, realized that if you can solve for verification, which is essentially, you know, you can solve the, the testing part, uh, you can actually automate all the software engineering. That was sort of our key insight, that like, you know, verification is the loop which sort of keeps agent running for a longer, longer period of time. And that's when we pivoted to looking at general coding agent as a space, and we, uh, started building a general coding agent.