Emergent Labs Inc., a startup with an artificial intelligence platform for building applications, today announced that it has raised $23 million in funding.

Lightspeed Venture Partners led the Series A round. It was joined by Y Combinator, Google LLC Chief Scientist Jeff Dean and several other backers. The investment brings Emergent’s total outside funding to $30 million.

Emergent’s namesake AI platform enables business users to generate applications with natural language instructions. The starting point of development projects is a ChatGPT-like interface into which workers can enter a high-level description of the software they wish to build. From there, Emergent generates the necessary code and displays a step-by-step overview of how it performed the task.

Customers can connect the software they build to their company’s internal systems. For example, a sales team might give an Emergent application access to its customer relationship management platform. Team members can then create an AI agent that analyzes the data in the CRM to measure seasonal sales fluctuations.

Emergent also makes it possible to create AI agents for other tasks. The platform can automatically perform market research, carry out recurring business tasks at user-specified times and build software integrations. Coding agents built by customers can access GitHub repositories via a built-in connector.

The company says customers can use its platform to build not only internal applications but also customer-facing software. A retailer, for example, could create a portal that enables customers to submit product return requests.

Under the hood, Emergent uses a group of AI agents to create applications. The agents generate code, test the code for bugs and automatically fix any issues they find. They also build cybersecurity features. Emergent can equip an application with authentication capabilities and a password hashing mechanism that stores users’ login credentials in an unreadable format.

The company sells its platform in four editions. The most advanced plan for individuals, the $167 per month Pro tier, offers a context window of one million tokens. Emergent also offers two business subscriptions that include additional cybersecurity and collaboration features.

Emergent made its platform generally available in June. It has since gained more than one million users who are generating $15 million in annualized recurring revenue.

Companies use the platform to build not only cloud applications and websites but also mobile apps. Currently, those mobile apps are powered by an open-source development framework called Exo. It reportedly plans to replace Exo with a custom tool and build features that will make it easier for developers to make money from their apps.

Image: Emergent