Dubai:— Emergent, one of the fastest growing AI startups globally, announced $30 million in total funding, including a new $23 million Series A led by Lightspeed. This follows a $7 million seed round raised earlier in the year. Founded in 2025 in San Francisco, Emergent has already reached $15 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) within just 90 days of launch, making it one of the fastest-growing AI-startups globally.
With MENA emerging as one of the most active hubs for software innovation and SME digital transformation, Emergent’s entry into the region is set to empower entrepreneurs and small businesses to rapidly build and scale applications without coding. Participation in the round also came from YC, Together, Prosus, and leading angels including Jeff Dean (Google), Devendra Chaplot (Thinking Machines), Siqi Chen (Runway), Srinivasan Venkatachary (Google DeepMind), Prasanna (Rippling), and Balaji Srinivasan.
Emergent’s agentic vibe-coding platform allows anyone, from solo founders to SMEs, to build full-stack, production-grade applications powered by autonomous AI agents. Unlike existing tools, Emergent’s gives you a ready-to-use app from day one. It handles everything – from the screens people see, to the servers, logins, payments, and the ability to scale the platform – automatically. Behind the scenes, a team of specialised AI agents code, test and launch, so it feels like you have your own development team in the cloud. These agents can spot and fix issues, work across long sessions, and remember what you’re building. The coding agent and the entire infrastructure to support app building was built in-house, ground up to provide reliability, speed and security.
“My brother and I built Emergent to equip anyone with an idea and a phone with the tools to create software affordably,” shared Mukund Jha, Co-founder and CEO. “For decades, the biggest barrier to innovation has been access to technical talent and capital. We designed Emergent to remove those barriers so that anyone, from a shopkeeper to a startup founder, can bring their vision to life at a fraction of the time and cost. In regions like MENA, where governments are driving digital-first economies and SMEs form the backbone of growth, we see a tremendous opportunity. Our platform ensures that innovation is no longer limited to software engineers, it belongs to everyone.”
Emergent solutions are already making waves globally, where small businesses and individuals are using Emergent to solve real problems: a jewelry store owner streamlined pricing across 50 stores and now sells her app to others; a healthcare business digitized wheelchair inventory with photo-based onboarding; an EV marketplace app (UK), an individual living with chronic pain built a custom tool to better manage his condition and, a Dubai-based professional discovered Emergent during an Al course and built a voice-powered productivity app in a week. He is now working to turn it into a full-scale tool for creators, professionals, and researchers. These stories show what’s possible, and in MENA, Emergent aims to bring the same revolutionary solutions to empower thousands of SMEs and entrepreneurs to tackle local challenges and scale with ease.
“Remember when photography demanded understanding lenses, aperture, lighting, film development, and more? Then the iPhone compressed all of it into a single button for billions of people. Emergent collapses the complexity of software into a single button anyone can press to ship, scale, and earn, and Lightspeed is proud to back them on this exciting journey,” said Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed.
The funding will fuel Emergent’s expansion into high-growth regions including the Middle East, where governments are investing heavily in digital transformation and SME empowerment under initiatives like UAE Vision 2030 and Saudi Vision 2030. Every spreadsheet hack, every manual process and every “there should be an app for that” idea can now become real software with ease with Emergent. The brand will play a pivotal role in enabling entrepreneurs, creators, and enterprises across MENA and Asia to accelerate innovation.
Emergent has already enabled over 1 Million+ users, and 1.5M apps, with use cases ranging from retail and healthcare to logistics, personal productivity and more.
Emergent is actively working to grow AI awareness and would love to find more partners in the region. Email them at [email protected].
Start building with Emergent today at: https://emergent.sh/