Emergent: The AI App Builder for Everyone
Mukhund and Madhav Jha, co-founders of Emergent, detail their journey of building an AI-powered app builder that reached $15M ARR in three months. They discuss their pivot from enterprise agents, the multi-agent architecture that enables production-ready apps, and their vision for a future with a 'billion builders'.
Mukhund and Madhav Jha, the twin brothers behind Emergent, view the current moment in technology as a significant “big reset” driven by AI. They believe the next two decades will be defined by artificial intelligence, comparing the present opportunity to “Bitcoin at dollar one,” and advocate for founders to be bold and go all-in on problems they are passionate about.
Emergent is an AI app builder designed to empower anyone, regardless of programming knowledge, to create production-ready mobile apps, web apps, and websites. Users simply describe their idea in natural language prompts, and the platform generates a fully functional, launchable application. This approach has led to rapid growth, achieving $15M ARR within three months of launch, attracting 1.7 million users, and facilitating the creation of over 2.5 million applications.
The Journey: From Enterprise Agents to a Consumer App Builder
The initial idea, developed during their time in Y Combinator, was to build AI agents for automated software testing. The founders held a strong conviction that agent autonomy would increase exponentially. This led them to focus on “agents which can do long horizon tasks” rather than the more common co-pilot model.
Their research culminated in creating one of the world’s top-performing coding agents, ranking #1 on the SWE-bench benchmark. Initially, they targeted the enterprise market but found the feedback cycles to be too slow. Drawing on Mukhund’s consumer background as a founder of Dunzo, they pivoted. The nine months of foundational research into building high-quality, autonomous agents became the critical technology that powered their consumer-facing app builder and fueled its subsequent success.
Under the Hood: The Multi-Agent Architecture
Emergent’s core technical differentiator is its sophisticated, multi-agent architecture designed to mirror the workflow of a human developer.
- Interactive Prompting: When a user enters a prompt, the system first engages in a conversation to clarify requirements. This helps route the request to the appropriate specialized agent (e.g., for web, mobile, or backend development).
- Isolated “Devbox” Environment: For each building process, Emergent spins up a virtual machine in the cloud. This provides the agent with an isolated environment where it can perform tasks like a human developer: installing libraries, writing code, and executing files.
- Tight Feedback Loops: The entire infrastructure, including databases and backends, is built in-house. This allows for a very tight feedback loop. For instance, when an agent writes a file, linting passes are run automatically, providing immediate feedback and improving code quality.
- Specialized Agents for the Full Lifecycle: The platform goes beyond simple code generation by employing a suite of specialized agents:
- Design Agent: Creates the application’s user interface and design.
- Testing Agent: Performs autonomous testing to ensure functionality.
- Security Agent: Conducts security checks before deployment.
- Deployment Agent: Converts all build steps into Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and deploys the application to Emergent’s cluster.
This integrated, multi-agent approach allows the platform to build complex, production-ready applications that can reach up to 40,000 lines of code, a significant leap from competitors who typically cap out around 10,000 lines.
Empowering a New Generation of Builders
While initially expecting their user base to be semi-technical individuals like product managers and designers, the founders were surprised to see builders from all walks of life. The platform has attracted entrepreneurs, small business owners, and domain experts who have a personal problem they want to solve.
Examples include:
- A microbiologist who built a custom audiobook app to change narrators using 11 Labs voices.
- A jewelry store owner who created an AI pricing engine that determines repair costs from a photo.
- A gardener who developed a complete SaaS application for managing job allocation and location tracking.
The key user segment they retain is “power users”—serious builders with a clear vision, who exhibit retention rates of 85-90%.
Go-to-Market and Future Vision
To launch in a crowded market, Emergent executed a methodical go-to-market strategy centered on influencer marketing. They ran an invite-only beta, providing influencers with unique codes to track performance meticulously. They discovered that the most effective content was created when influencers built an app themselves on the platform, sharing the creation journey with their audience.
With a recent $23 million Series A funding round, the company is focused on expanding its 12-person team, investing heavily in research to build the world’s best coding agent, and perfecting the software engineering lifecycle on the platform. Their ultimate vision is to enable a “billion builders,” creating a future where anyone with an idea can bring it to life through software.