Emergent’s $70M Round Highlights India’s Growing Role in the Global AI Boom

India’s role in the AI boom is starting to look a lot bigger than “cheap engineering talent” or “the next outsourcing hub.” The momentum is shifting toward something more serious: India building real AI companies, shipping real products, and raising real money at speed.

A good example is Emergent, an Indian startup building a “vibe-coding” platform that uses AI agents to help users design, build, test, and deploy full-stack web and mobile apps. The company just raised a $70 million Series B less than four months after closing a $23 million Series A — a fundraising sprint that would look aggressive even in Silicon Valley. The new round was co-led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Khosla Ventures and values Emergent at $300 million post-money, up from roughly $100 million in its previous round.

That kind of jump isn’t just startup hype. It’s a signal investors are paying attention to a bigger trend: India isn’t only supplying talent to global AI giants anymore — it’s becoming a place where AI businesses are being built from the ground up.

Emergent claims it already has around $50 million in annual recurring revenue and more than 5 million users across 190-plus countries, with a goal of crossing $100 million ARR by April 2026. Whether those numbers hold up long-term is something the market will decide, but it helps explain why the company is attracting heavyweight backers beyond SoftBank and Khosla, including Prosus, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Together, and Y Combinator. In total, Emergent has raised $100 million within seven months of launching.

What’s happening here isn’t just about one startup. It’s part of a broader shift in how the AI world is being distributed globally. For years, the assumption was that serious AI innovation had to live near Silicon Valley — close to elite venture networks, top research labs, and big tech headquarters. But that map is changing. India has the engineers, the education pipeline, and a fast-growing startup ecosystem that’s increasingly willing to build product companies, not just service businesses.

This shift matters because AI development is becoming less about who has the most hype and more about who has the deepest talent. Compute still matters, sure, but the real bottleneck in AI isn’t only GPUs — it’s finding and keeping the people who can build, improve, and ship systems that work at scale. India has one of the largest pools of technical talent in the world, and the more local AI companies can offer compelling careers at home, the less inevitable “move to the U.S.” becomes.

Emergent is a good snapshot of that trend in practice. The startup says it’s headquartered in San Francisco, but most of its team — 70 out of 75 employees — works from an office in Bengaluru. That mix says a lot about how modern AI companies are being built: global-facing, U.S.-market aware, but heavily powered by Indian execution and talent density.

It also highlights another advantage Indian startups have right now: efficiency. The cost structure for building teams in India is still meaningfully lower than in the U.S., and that can translate into faster iteration and less capital burn — which is huge in a space where competition is moving at breakneck speed. It’s part of why vibe-coding platforms like Cursor, Replit, Lovable, and others have exploded so quickly, and why investors are racing to back the next one that looks like it can scale.

Of course, India’s rise as an AI innovation hub isn’t guaranteed. Infrastructure and data governance will matter. Regulatory clarity will matter too, especially as AI tools move into sensitive areas like finance, education, and healthcare. But the broader trajectory is hard to ignore. Even SoftBank’s involvement here stands out — the Emergent deal marks SoftBank’s most notable return to India investing in years, after previously backing ElasticRun.

The bigger takeaway is that India’s AI story is no longer just about talent supply — it’s about capability creation. Startups like Emergent are showing that world-class AI companies can be built with teams based in India, selling globally, and moving fast enough to compete in categories that used to feel dominated by Western startups.

And if this trend continues, the global AI race isn’t going to stay a two-country contest between the U.S. and China. India is building the conditions to become something else entirely: a third engine of AI innovation, powered by scale, speed, and an increasingly confident startup ecosystem.

See Emergent in action here:

This analysis is based on reporting from TechCrunch.

Image courtesy of Emergent.

This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.