Indian AI coding startup Emergent has raised $130 million in a Series C funding round at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation, a five-fold jump in six months.
The funding round was led by private equity firm Creaegis. New investors MNI Ventures-Claypond, Sentinel Global, and existing backers Khosla Ventures, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator also participated. The deal takes Emergent’s total funding to $230 million. The startup had previously raised a $70 million Series B at a $300 million valuation in January.
AI coding has attracted hordes of investors, with startups such as Lovable, Replit, and Cursor raising billions in funding to develop tools that allow developers to speed up their work. AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic have also pushed deeper into coding.
Emergent is looking to gain a share of this crowded market by targeting entrepreneurs looking to start new businesses and small and medium-sized companies that have traditionally relied on email, spreadsheets, and messaging apps to run their operations.
“Our thesis has always been to build a production-grade application for serious builders,” Emergent co-founder and chief executive Mukund Jha (pictured above, right) told TechCrunch in an interview. “So you’re basically getting an engineering team in a box.”
