Meet the man behind the Saas-Pocalypse: Emergent's Mukund Jha

Think vibecoding is a fad? Emergent has just closed its Series C funding round, securing a further US $130 million, while rocketing to a US $1.5 billion valuation in short shrift. That tells only part of the story, with millions of 'emergent' use cases affirming the value proposition of putting software development directly in the hands of those who know exactly what they need.

It's the magic of AI made practical, and so far some 12 million applications have been created by Emergent's technology, and it all started with co-founder Mukund Jha.

"We started about two years back as a research lab with this sort of giant realisation of what AI is going to be, and started working on autonomous coding agents [eventually] building one of the world's best coding agents," said Jha. "And then we started reimagining what the world would look like in this new paradigm of software development."

The few and the many (and who benefits from the march of technology)

There's a principle in economics that what benefits the many often comes at a cost to the few. That's a reality laid starkly bare with the emergence of AI. It can look like job losses, but for every 'job' that AI replaces, once-costly outcomes become commoditised and cheap. The 'few' who provided that outcome must adapt. The 'many' get better products at reduced cost.

With application software, 'the many' are businesses everywhere. The few are 'traditional' independent software vendors, software developers and, potentially, even business analysts who were once essential in translating business requirements into software specifications.

What they provide is expensive, and not necessarily a great fit. After all, software products are designed to meet the needs of as many businesses as possible for maximum market reach, at the cost of being perfect for almost none.

All that is changing, and fast, with the net effect that the few are suffering while the many are benefiting handsomely by getting software far closer to perfect, at a greatly reduced cost, by simply talking their needs into existence.

Addressing the infernal and internal problem of right-fit software

Fast forward to present, and Emergent has made a reality of 'citizen-led' software development, effectively consigning one of the thorniest problems in creating effective software for small to medium businesses, to the junk heap of history.

That problem is the yawning gulf between what a business owner wants his systems to do, and the ability of COTS software to do it. Standard applications leave big gaps, often plastered over by spreadsheets, occasionally filled by costly custom software (which is risky in its own right, for various reasons).

"We realised that as AI gets more powerful, a lot of software development work, including code reviews, testing, debugging, deployment, will be consumed by coding agents. Soon, you'll never have to see the code behind the scene," Jha continued.

Remember the 'consumerisation of IT'? Most of us have no idea how a smartphone works, and why should we. That process is hitting software development. "We started imagining the world from that lens and thought 'what if you could just instruct your agents in pure natural language, just like you would chat with a developer, and it actually created fully working software for you?"

Business owner becomes software owner

Long story short, that's what Emergent did. "That became our number one sweet spot, and we built out every single thing required to emulate a software engineering team," Jha confirmed.

At launch, the expectation was that Emergent would appeal to project managers, software architects and senior engineers. "What was surprising is that most users are actually business operators, people with deep domain expertise in their business, who have a clear understanding of what they want, but have traditionally been bottlenecked by lack of access to engineering teams and quality dev shops."

As an example, Jha cited an Ohio roofing company using multiple SaaS products along with the inevitable Excel sheets papering over the gaps. Now, "They've built out custom software for themselves, which fits their workflow. They really understood their problems and requirements [and created the exact software to address them]."

Product development and market expansion

Asked what changes with the conclusion of the latest capital raise, Jha said horizons are considerably broader. "Our mission has expanded. When we started, we were a pure software development vibe coding platform, right? Now our scope is to become an operating system for small and medium businesses. The funding is largely targeted towards going deep into this market and becoming an AI partner for small and medium businesses, with a large part going towards product development and accelerating our Go To Market."

If it seems an exciting time for Emergent (and it is), bear in mind that the company is the few. The many are the hundreds of thousands, and millions, of small to medium businesses which, thanks to this company and others like it, make truly custom and tight fitting software economically possible.