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Emergent, the vibe-coding startup, has a $100 million annual run rate and 6 million users across 190 countries. Plus, it’s backed by the biggest names in the industry—Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Google, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator. By most conventional measures, Emergent is the most successful consumer AI startup to come out of India, and is one of the fastest-growing companies anywhere in the world right now.
But there’s something strange about Emergent—its users seem to be “invisible”.
Historically, all great consumer products follow the same script. It begins with a small, fanatical cohort who discovers it. Those users can’t stop talking about it—on forums, in group chats, at their desks, and on social media. Sometimes, referral codes and invites are sold at a premium online. Word of mouth becomes the engine. Then paid marketing arrives, pouring fuel on a fire that the early users started. All popular consumer products in India, from Cred, Zomato, and Groww, followed a variant of this playbook.
And that’s true for AI companies as well. Cursor got so popular with developers that it practically became a verb. Lovable created a culture where users couldn’t stop sharing all the beautiful websites they’d vibe-coded. And when Claude went down for a few minutes, the internet came to a halt.
Emergent has none of that. Search for it on Hacker News, and you’ll struggle to find anyone talking about it. All the stuff that other AI companies seem to have, i.e., the showcase culture, the loyal cohort, the community of users, seems to be missing.
How do we square Emergent’s extraordinary revenue with its equally perplexing invisible users?
That’s the question that we try to answer.
And to do that, Praveen sits down with Gaurav Bisen, founder of Masonry AI and the person who built Emergent’s early growth engine—zero to $20 million ARR in 120 days with zero paid ads, and with Sumanth Raghavendra, co-founder of Presentations.AI and serial entrepreneur who has watched the same pattern play out with his own product.
Praveen comes in as a skeptic who wants to be convinced, searching for evidence that explains Emergent’s invisible users. And Gaurav and Sumanth argue that Emergent’s missing users isn’t a bug but was most probably a feature.
References:
Emergent founder Mukund Jha’s job depends on not worrying about the next AI model
