In this episode of The Lightcone, we talk with Mukund and Madhav Jha, the founders of Emergent - an AI platform that lets anyone build and ship production-ready software. In just eight months, users have created more than 7 million apps on Emergent, with the number doubling in just the last 45 days. We discuss how they built one of the most powerful AI coding agents, why they focused on non-technical users and what it's like building for a global audience from India. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 01:06 - What Is Emergent? 01:18 - Founder Backstory 02:09 - From AI Testing to General Coding Agents 02:52 - Getting Ahead of the Market 04:18 - The Pivot to Non-Technical Users 05:22 - Why Second Movers Can Win in AI 09:04 - Building for Production, Not Just Prototypes 18:21 - Live Demo: Building Apps with Emergent 24:40 - How Emergent Hires and Runs a Lean Team 29:04 - Is SaaS Dead? The Rise of Personalized Software 34:04 - The Future: Niche Apps, Solo Builders and AI Agency
Mukund Jha is the co-founder and CEO of Emergent, a platform that lets anyone without programming knowledge build, ship, and monetize real software by chatting with an AI agent. Launched roughly nine months ago, Emergent has surpassed 8.5 million users across 190 countries, seen more than 10 million apps built on the platform. At Startup School India, Mukund sat down with YC Managing Partner Jared Friedman to go over his founder journey and insights from building two successful companies. https://emergent.sh Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 00:56 - What is Emergent? 02:54 - 9 Months to $100M ARR 03:44 - Why build a global company from India? 05:00 - Dunzo: The Origin Story 06:36 - Five Startups Before This One 10:35 - Lessons from scaling Dunzo 13:21 - Leaving Dunzo and finding Emergent 15:44 - Tinkering as a Startup strategy 17:25 - Living at the edge 18:07 - The multi-agent architecture 20:42 - Beating the SWE-bench benchmark 22:42 - Second mover advantage 25:32 - Building global from Bangalore 27:11 - Outro