Emergent: How Six Months of Tinkering Led To A $100M ARR Company

After leaving Dunzo in 2023, Mukund spent six months exploring AI tools and building projects without a business plan. That tinkering helped him and his twin brother and co-founder, Madhav, see that coding could be transformed by AI. They chose to pursue autonomous software engineering despite investors' doubts about whether models were ready.

Emergent uses specialized agents for tasks such as design and automated testing, coordinated by a memory system that learns from apps built on the platform. The team developed its own coding agent and infrastructure, including disk and memory snapshots so parallel agents could work from the same state. Mukund says the platform focuses on delivering functional apps with back ends and databases, rather than demos.

At YC, the team tried several directions while working on SWE-bench, a coding benchmark. After three months, its four-person team reached number one, developing techniques including parallel test-time compute, agent memory, and agent-to-agent communication. Mukund says the benchmark gave the team a clear target and helped lay the groundwork for Emergent.

Emergent grew through influencer marketing, which the team modeled as a funnel from social views and impressions to clicks and users. The company is based mainly in Bangalore, with a small San Francisco team; Mukund says 95% of its team is in India. He reports 8.5 million users across 190 countries, over $100 million in annualized run rate, and most revenue from the U.S. and Europe.

Mukund says building for India or for global customers takes similar effort, and advises founders to think globally from the start. He also recommends trusting intuition grounded in customer understanding and setting ambitious goals. From Dunzo, he carried forward the value of solving hard operational problems, staying close to customers, and focusing on what works.