Mukund Jha, co-founder and CEO and Madhav Jha, co-founder of Emergent (Left to Right)/Image: Supplied
Emergent, one of the world’s fastest-growing AI startups, has announced $30m in total funding, including a $23m Series A led by Lightspeed. This follows a $7m seed round earlier this year. Founded in 2025 in San Francisco, the company has already achieved $15m in annual recurring revenue (ARR) within just 90 days of launch, underscoring its rapid trajectory.
With MENA fast becoming a hub for software innovation and SME digital transformation, Emergent’s entry into the region will empower entrepreneurs and small businesses to build and scale applications without coding. Participation in the funding round also included YC, Together, Prosus, and leading angel investors such as Jeff Dean (Google), Devendra Chaplot (Thinking Machines), Siqi Chen (Runway), Srinivasan Venkatachary (Google DeepMind), Prasanna (Rippling), and Balaji Srinivasan.
Emergent’s agentic vibe-coding platform enables anyone—from solo founders to SMEs—to build full-stack, production-grade applications powered by autonomous AI agents. Unlike existing tools, Emergent provides a ready-to-use app from day one, managing everything from user interfaces to servers, logins, payments, and scalability. Its specialised AI agents code, test, and launch applications, offering the equivalent of a cloud-based development team that can identify and fix issues, sustain long sessions, and retain context. Built entirely in-house, the platform’s coding agent and infrastructure are designed for speed, reliability, and security.
“My brother and I built Emergent to equip anyone with an idea and a phone with the tools to create software affordably,” shared Mukund Jha, co-founder and CEO. “For decades, the biggest barrier to innovation has been access to technical talent and capital. We designed Emergent to remove those barriers so that anyone, from a shopkeeper to a startup founder, can bring their vision to life at a fraction of the time and cost. In regions like MENA, where governments are driving digital-first economies and SMEs form the backbone of growth, we see a tremendous opportunity. Our platform ensures that innovation is no longer limited to software engineers, it belongs to everyone.”
Globally, small businesses and individuals are already deploying Emergent to solve real problems. Examples include a jewelry store owner who streamlined pricing across 50 outlets and now sells her app to others; a healthcare provider digitising wheelchair inventory with photo-based onboarding; and an EV marketplace app in the UK. In Dubai, a professional attending an AI course used Emergent to build a voice-powered productivity app in a week, which he is now developing into a full-scale tool for creators, professionals, and researchers.
“Remember when photography demanded understanding lenses, aperture, lighting, film development, and more? Then the iPhone compressed all of it into a single button for billions of people. Emergent collapses the complexity of software into a single button anyone can press to ship, scale, and earn, and Lightspeed is proud to back them on this exciting journey,” said Hemant Mohapatra, partner at Lightspeed.
The new funding will fuel Emergent’s expansion into high-growth regions including the Middle East, where governments are driving digital transformation and SME empowerment under initiatives such as UAE Vision 2030 and Saudi Vision 2030. Every spreadsheet hack, manual workflow, or “there should be an app for that” idea can now be turned into software with Emergent’s platform.
To date, Emergent has enabled over 1 million users to create more than 1.5 million apps across industries from retail and healthcare to logistics and personal productivity.
