$10M ARR in 2 Months: Emergent and the Age of Cheetah Companies
Unicorns are passé.
In the AI era, the most exciting companies aren’t taking 8–10 years to grind their way to a billion-dollar valuation. They’re hitting massive milestones in months, not years.
I call them Cheetah Companies — ventures designed for velocity from day one. And this week, one of the fastest cheetahs I’ve ever seen made headlines: Emergent, which just crossed $10M ARR in two months.
What makes a cheetah?
A Cheetah Company isn’t just fast for the sake of it — it’s built for speed.
The founders, the product, and the market line up so perfectly that decisions happen almost on instinct. The technology is AI-native, designed to ship and iterate without friction. And the go-to-market mindset is global from day zero — no “win the local market first” playbook here.
That’s why they can do in a quarter what most companies take years to achieve.
Emergent: a cheetah in the wild
When twin brothers Mukund and Madhav Jha launched Emergent, they weren’t thinking about making a slightly better coding assistant. They went much bigger — a multi-agent AI platform that behaves like a complete engineering team.
Their “vibe coding” approach means AI agents act like designers, developers, and product managers and testers working together — sharing context across files, remembering decisions, and delivering production-ready software without the user writing a single line of code.
And the results have been staggering: In just 10 weeks, Emergent has reached $10M ARR, seen 900,000+ apps built across 184 countries, and done it all without spending a dollar on paid marketing. A team of just 12 engineers is operating at the scale of a 100-person company.
The bet before the proof
When we first met Mukund and Madhav at Together Fund, they didn’t walk in with a slide deck. They brought a vision — to make software development accessible to anyone, anywhere.
We led their $7M seed round before YC, not because the market had already validated them, but because we could feel it — the passion, the global ambition, and the clarity of thought that’s rare to find all at once.
Why this moment matters
Emergent isn’t a one-off. It’s part of a bigger wave — AI-first, global-ready companies being built in India right now.
The IndiaAI Mission is committing ₹10,000 crore to foundational AI infrastructure and planning 18,000–50,000 GPUs to power it. Cities like Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Pune are building AI talent density to rival Silicon Valley. In 2024 alone, Bengaluru startups raised $3.3B — and AI was one of the leading categories.
This is the environment where cheetahs thrive. Emergent is proof that India can produce them at global scale.
From unicorns to cheetahs
The old scoreboard celebrated unicorn valuations. The new one celebrates time-to-impact — how fast you can hit ARR milestones, how quickly users adopt your product, how far you can go globally from day one.
Emergent shows what’s possible when speed meets substance. And in this new game, the winners won’t just cross the finish line first — they’ll change where the finish line even is.
We are entering the Age of Cheetahs. Emergent is just the opening sprint.
