Emergent has raised $23 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed, with backing from YC, Prosus, Together, and a lineup of AI luminaries including Jeff Dean, Edo Liberty, and Balaji Srinivasan. The startup calls itself the first true vibe coding platform—a new approach where building production-ready software is less about writing code and more about channeling intent, expertise, and creativity into working applications.

Vibe coding flips the traditional model of software creation. Instead of painstakingly writing functions, debugging, and assembling infrastructure, Emergent gives users a single interface where autonomous AI agents handle the heavy lifting. You describe the “vibe” of what you want—an app to price jewelry repairs, manage medical equipment, sell EVs, or track personal health—and the platform spins up both the frontend and backend, from login systems to payment rails. The coding agents run long sessions, test continuously, and remember your project, effectively becoming a cloud-based development team. The result isn’t a prototype or toy app but a scalable, customizable, production-grade product from day one.

This reframing of software creation has profound implications. For decades, starting a business with a digital component required coding skills, capital, or a technical co-founder. That gatekeeping excluded millions of people with ideas but no access to engineering. With vibe coding, domain expertise matters more than technical skill—what you know about your craft, community, or market becomes the raw material for software. Emergent is already proving it works, with over a million people having created 1.5 million apps and the company crossing $15 million ARR within just 90 days of launch.

Like the iPhone did for photography, collapsing lenses, lighting, and film into a single button, Emergent collapses the complexity of software into a single action: ship your idea. It signals a structural shift in who gets to code, who gets to create, and ultimately, who gets to participate in the digital economy. Vibe coding is less about learning syntax and more about capturing vision—and Emergent is betting that this shift will open the doors of entrepreneurship to anyone with an idea and a phone.