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
