An Indian startup focused on AI-powered coding has secured $130 million in a Series C funding round, giving it a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion. This marks a five-fold increase in just six months. The round was led by private equity firm Creaegis, with participation from new investors MNI Ventures-Claypond and Sentinel Global, as well as existing backers including Khosla Ventures, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator. This latest deal brings the company’s total funding to $230 million. Earlier in January, the startup had raised $70 million in a Series B round at a $300 million valuation.

The AI coding space has attracted significant investor interest, with companies like Lovable, Replit, and Cursor raising billions to develop tools that help developers accelerate their work. Major AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic have also deepened their involvement in coding. Emergent aims to carve out a share of this competitive market by focusing on entrepreneurs launching new ventures and small to medium-sized businesses that have traditionally depended on email, spreadsheets, and messaging apps for their operations. “So you’re basically getting an engineering team in a box,” the company’s founder explained.

The startup has achieved an annual run-rate revenue of $120 million, a 70% increase over the past four months, and now serves more than 200,000 paying customers. Emergent was founded in June of last year by Jha and his brother Madhav Jha, who serves as CTO. Its customer base includes trucking companies building shipment tracking software, factories, construction firms creating enterprise resource planning systems, and property managers developing internal customer management tools. India accounts for about 8% to 9% of its customer base.

Emergent’s focus on small businesses and entrepreneurs puts it in direct competition with Replit, which Jha described as its closest rival. He distinguished Emergent from developer-focused coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor, noting that non-technical users need a platform that handles deployment, hosting, testing, and debugging alongside the programming work. However, Jha acknowledged that design remains a weakness, pointing out that many websites built using AI tools tend to look similar.

The company plans to use the fresh capital to accelerate product development and research, including improving the success rate of applications built on its platform and its core AI agent workflows. Emergent is working to support more complex AI applications, including those using local and open source models, Jha said. It will also invest in expanding its go-to-market operations. The company is considering opening an office in Europe, where Jha noted Emergent is seeing significant customer traction. Currently, Emergent has about 200 employees, mostly based in Bengaluru, with a handful in San Francisco. The startup plans to expand its San Francisco office by 30 to 40 people by the end of the year, Jha added.