Emergent Featured in Anthropic's Applied AI Startup Series

Anthropic recently sat down with Emergent co-founder Mukund Jha as part of their applied AI startup series. Their applied AI engineers serve as trusted technical advisors helping top AI-native startups build on the Claude Developer Platform as they grow from early product to scale. Being selected for this series signals a level of technical depth that Anthropic considers worth highlighting to its broader audience.

You can watch the full conversation above. 

Here are the key highlights.

From YC testing tool to production platform

Emergent started inside Y Combinator as a software testing automation tool. The team quickly realized that the same infrastructure they were building to verify code could power general-purpose coding agents. When they launched the platform, they expected semi-technical users like product managers and designers. Instead, business operators and domain experts with no coding background became the primary audience.

That pattern has held at scale. Nearly 40% of Emergent's users are small businesses, and about 70% have no prior coding experience. Most users are building business-facing apps such as custom CRMs, ERPs, and inventory management and logistics tools, with 80-90% of new projects focused on mobile apps.

Infrastructure built from the ground up

Rather than relying on third-party tools, the team built custom container technology on top of Kubernetes with disc and memory snapshotting to support parallel agents. Emergent was one of the first teams to productionize multi-agent systems, with dedicated agents for building, refactoring, security checks, and post-deployment monitoring.

This infrastructure-first approach is a key reason Emergent's deployment success rate moved from 84% to 98%. Nearly every user who starts building on the platform is able to ship to production. Mukund emphasized that users compare Emergent to hiring a dev shop (a $250,000, three-month engagement), not to using an IDE, so the quality bar is fundamentally higher.

8 million users across 190+ countries

Mukund referenced 7 million users during the conversation, but that number has already moved. Emergent has now enabled more than eight million founders and business owners across 190+ countries to create and ship production-ready software.

One story from the interview captures what that growth looks like at the individual level. Kristi, a clinical psychologist and equestrian coach in Alaska, had been trying for 10 years to build an app combining both fields. A dev shop quoted her $50,000. She found Emergent, built the app herself, and now has it live on the App Store with hundreds of active users.

What's Next

Mukund previewed Wingman during the conversation, a product that moves beyond app building into automating entire business operations: finances, sales, marketing, and daily workflows. His view is that 2026 is the year small businesses start automating large parts of how they operate, and Emergent wants to be the platform where that happens.

If you're ready to build your next product without writing code, get started on Emergent. Follow our News section for more updates.