Interview, Fireside Chat, Product Demonstration
AI Is Unlocking Millions Of New Builders
- Emergent is a YC Summer 2024-funded company led by twin brothers Mukund and Madhav Jar, enabling non-technical users to build and ship production-ready software using AI agents.
- The platform has built 7 million apps in eight months since launch, marking it as one of the fastest-growing companies in YC history.
- Approximately 80% of users are non-technical with zero programming knowledge, operating globally across over 190 countries (primarily US and Europe).
- Founders initially launched in 2023 with a focus on automated software testing, pivoting to a general coding agent in 2024 after realizing that solving verification could automate the entire software engineering lifecycle.
- The platform's core engineering team started as a research effort, achieving number one status on the SWE-bench benchmark within two months by optimizing for agent orchestration, memory, and test-time compute.
- A strategic pivot occurred after founders observed that enterprise adoption was too slow; they shifted focus to non-technical users who needed to ship functional, full-stack applications rather than just prototypes.
- Emergent differentiates itself by building its own Kubernetes-based infrastructure to ensure agents run in the same environment during development and deployment, eliminating "it works on my machine" errors.
- The tech stack features a Python backend and React frontend (unlike the Node-heavy stacks of competitors like Lovable or Bolt) to support complex background jobs and asynchronous processing from day one.
- Agents utilize multi-agent architecture with a long-term memory system that aggregates past trajectories to create "skills," allowing agents to learn across sessions without retraining or exceeding context windows.
- The platform offers an internal "Agent Experience" metric to optimize feedback loops, hiding technical complexity (like diff views or JSON) from users to prevent cognitive overload.
- To overcome distribution challenges as a second mover, Emergent launched an influencer marketing engine on TikTok and Instagram, focusing messaging on "shipping real apps" rather than just prototyping.
- Founders report that internal adoption is extensive, with teams building CRMs, customer support software, and even a clone of Asana (Asana-clone) entirely on the platform to dogfood the product.
- The team operates with a lean structure (approx. 12 engineers), hiring primarily for problem-solving and ownership, with many hires drawn from the founders' previous company, Dunzo, and top IIT rankers.
- The company maintains a split workforce with most staff in Bangalore, India, and a small satellite office in San Francisco, enabling 24/7 development cycles.
- Founders predict the future of SaaS involves agentic workflows, with roughly 20% of apps currently built on Emergent featuring embedded agents that automate user workflows.
- Future development is focused on long-horizon agents, currently seeing 4-10 hour task durations with goals to reach 24-hour autonomous operation and multi-agent swarms coordinating complex tasks.
- To mitigate risks of model commoditization, Emergent is investing in custom fine-tuned verification layers rather than building foundation models, leveraging the unique strengths of different models (e.g., Opus for logic, Codex for debugging).
- The platform has democratized software building, enabling solopreneurs and domain experts (e.g., a psychologist/horse-riding coach) to launch paid products for $5,000 instead of the traditional $500,000 dev shop cost.
- Founders argue that AI is not replacing knowledge work but expanding the market by allowing individuals to execute business ideas previously blocked by technical barriers, creating a "camera explosion of ideas."
- Current internal trends show a consolidation of roles, where single PMs or engineers now perform the work of 5-6 person teams, driving a "hedonic adaptation" where work volume and velocity increase alongside tool capability.
- The company is actively hiring in SF and Bangalore for research, backend, and frontend roles, emphasizing customer empathy through weekly direct customer support interactions by all staff.