Emergent, an Indian-founded “vibe-coding” startup that promises to let anyone build full-stack applications with the help of AI agents, has secured $70 million in fresh funding, underscoring the intense investor appetite for AI-powered developer tools.

The new Series B round was jointly led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 and Khosla Ventures, according to people familiar with the deal. The investment values Emergent at about $300 million post-money, a sharp step up for a company that has existed for less than a year and raised a $23 million Series A only months earlier.

With this latest round, Emergent’s total capital raised climbs to $100 million within seven months of launch, placing it among the fastest-funded early-stage AI startups to emerge from India’s tech ecosystem.

Existing backers Prosus, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Together, and Y Combinator also participated in the round, signaling continued conviction from some of the most active investors in AI infrastructure and developer tooling.

Emergent’s pitch is straightforward but ambitious: use AI agents to collapse the complexity of software development so that entrepreneurs, small businesses, and non-technical teams can design, build, test, and deploy production-grade web and mobile apps without hiring large engineering teams.

The company says its platform has already attracted more than 5 million users across over 190 countries. It reports $50 million in annual recurring revenue and has set an internal target of crossing $100 million in ARR by April 2026, a trajectory that would place it among the fastest-growing SaaS companies globally if achieved.

Founder and chief executive Mukund Jha said the strongest demand is coming from the United States, Europe, and India, where small and midsize businesses are under pressure to digitize quickly but struggle to recruit and retain engineering talent. Emergent’s recently launched mobile app-building service, which extends its AI agents from web to native-style mobile experiences, is seeing particularly rapid adoption, he said.

Emergent describes itself as headquartered in San Francisco, but the company’s operational heart is in India. Of its 75 employees, 70 are based in Bengaluru, one of the world’s largest hubs for software engineering and AI research. The startup is hiring aggressively across product, research, and go-to-market roles in both India and the United States as it races to keep pace with user growth and an increasingly competitive landscape.

That landscape is crowded with well-funded rivals. Emergent competes with platforms such as Lovable, Cursor, and Replit, which have all grown quickly by promising to turn AI into a co-pilot or even a primary driver for software creation. These tools aim to let users describe what they want in natural language and rely on AI to generate, refactor, and maintain the underlying code.

Emergent’s “vibe-coding” positioning is an attempt to push that idea further. Rather than focusing only on code completion or snippet generation, the platform is designed to interpret a user’s intent, style, and product “vibe” — the overall feel and behavior they want from an app — and then orchestrate multiple AI agents to handle architecture, interface design, backend logic, testing, and deployment.

In practice, that means a solo founder or a small business owner can start with a loose description of a product idea and iteratively refine it through conversational prompts. Emergent’s agents then generate the codebase, wire up integrations, run tests, and deploy to production environments, while allowing more technical users to inspect and modify the underlying code when needed.

For investors, this category sits at the intersection of several powerful trends: the rise of generative AI, the global shortage of skilled developers, and the growing comfort among businesses with low-code and no-code tools. If AI can reliably handle more of the software lifecycle, the addressable market extends far beyond professional developers to include product managers, designers, operations teams, and founders who previously had to outsource or delay software projects.

Emergent’s rapid funding cadence also reflects a broader rush among venture firms to secure stakes in AI infrastructure and application-layer companies before the market consolidates. The participation of SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 is particularly notable. The Japanese investment giant had slowed its pace of new deals in India in recent years, and its backing of Emergent marks a renewed interest in the country’s AI and software sectors.

SoftBank has historically favored companies it believes can scale into global category leaders. Its investment in Emergent suggests a bet that AI-native development platforms could become foundational tools for the next generation of software companies, much as cloud infrastructure and version control platforms did in earlier eras.

Emergent’s rise is also part of a broader wave of India-founded AI startups attracting global capital. Accel, for instance, recently backed Rocket, another India-origin company building in the AI-assisted development space, in a sizable seed round alongside Together Fund and Salesforce Ventures. The pattern points to India’s growing role not just as a market and talent pool, but as a source of globally competitive AI products.

For now, Emergent plans to deploy its new capital on three main fronts: expanding its team, accelerating product development, and deepening its presence in key markets. On the product side, that likely means more specialized AI agents, tighter integrations with existing developer workflows, and improved support for complex enterprise use cases where security, compliance, and observability are critical.

Geographically, the company is expected to double down on the United States and Europe, where software spending is highest, while continuing to build out its base in India, where it can tap into a large pool of AI and full-stack engineering talent at scale.

Whether Emergent can maintain its growth in the face of intense competition will depend on how well it can differentiate its “vibe-coding” experience, convert free users into paying customers, and prove that AI-generated applications can meet the reliability and security standards of serious businesses.

But the size of its latest round, the caliber of its backers, and the speed at which it has raised suggest that, for now, investors are willing to bet that the future of software development will be shaped as much by conversational AI agents as by traditional code editors — and that Emergent has a real shot at being one of the platforms that defines that future.