The vibe-coding boom may look explosive — but Emergent CEO Mukund Jha says it’s just getting started.
The AI coding startup founder told Business Insider that the vibe-coding space is “at 1% of where the industry is going to be.”
“I keep telling people internally also that we are at a bitcoin $1 moment right now,” Jha said.
“You can see the excitement, you can see the revenue growth for everybody. This is when like, things are kind of just working,” he added.
Jha said the industry could soon hit a “massive inflection point,” when software produced through vibe coding becomes more reliable and widely usable.
He compared the moment to a time when only a small fraction of the world could read and write.
The market is “almost infinite,” he said, as vibe coding allows more people to build their own tools. “We’re massively like, undervalued,” he added.
Jha also said that the non-technical developer market is much larger than the developer market, and that the latter will “shrink.”
“You won’t need that many developers going forward as efficiency goes up,” Jha said. Marketing, product, and sales professionals who are closer to the business problem could soon build their own software — a market that is “really, really big.”
“There are only 20 million developers. There are roughly, like, 500 million knowledge workers, you know, who can produce software, and we think that number is going to go up,” he added.
Emergent said in February that it had achieved $100 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR, just eight months after launching. ARR refers to the revenue a company expects to generate annually from subscriptions or other recurring payments.
The startup added that its ARR doubled from $50 million to $100 million within a single month, highlighting the rapid momentum behind AI coding companies.
Business Insider reported in January that Emergent had secured a $70 million Series B round, pushing its total funding to about $100 million. Backers for the startup include Khosla Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed, Prosus, Together, Y Combinator, and Google’s AI Futures Fund.
Emergent is not alone in seeing rapid growth.
Lovable, a Swedish startup building AI coding tools, has also reported strong traction. Ryan Meadows, the company’s chief revenue officer, told Business Insider in an exclusive interview that Lovable’s ARR rose more than 30% in a single month, increasing from $300 million to $400 million.
Another breakout player in vibe coding, Cursor, said in a November announcement that it topped $1 billion in annualized revenue and was valued at nearly $30 billion.
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