Rocket.new, an Indian startup constructing an AI-powered app improvement platform, has raised $15 million in a seed spherical led by Salesforce Ventures to tackle viral vibe-coding rivals like Lovable, Cursor, and Bolt by letting customers construct full, production-ready apps from natural-language prompts relatively than simply fast prototypes.
Accel and Collectively Fund joined Salesforce Ventures within the all-equity seed spherical, which comes solely three months after Rocket.new launched its platform in beta in June.
Since its debut, the startup has crossed 400,000 customers — together with over 10,000 paid subscribers — in 180 international locations and reached $4.5 million in annual recurring income. It’s aiming to scale that to $20–$25 million by yr’s finish and $60–$70 million by June subsequent yr, co-founder and CEO Vishal Virani (pictured above, middle) stated in an unique interview.
Primarily based in Surat — a metropolis well-known for diamonds and textiles however removed from India’s common tech hubs — Virani teamed up with Rahul Shingala and Deepak Dhanak to launch Rocket.new. The startup marks a pivot from their earlier enterprise, DhiWise, which centered on developer workflows.
“We are building the first vibe solution platform, which is not solving just a problem of day one, but what we are focusing on is solving the problem of day two,” Virani informed TechCrunch.
The 16-week-old startup goals to develop into a complete agentic system, which is able to make the most of AI not solely to construct apps and web sites but additionally to conduct aggressive analysis and product improvement, eliminating the necessity for product managers.
“Our entire agentic system will help organizations build all kinds of functions around products — not just generating the source code — but even a facility to scale their product — all by giving natural-language prompts,” Virani asserted.
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The present mannequin, which Virani refers to as model 0.3, has already constructed half 1,000,000 purposes and attracted product managers, solopreneurs, and front-end builders. It additionally counts customers from corporations like Meta, PayPal, KPMG, PwC, and Instances Web, who flip to the platform for private tasks.
About 80% of Rocket.new’s customers have up to now constructed what Virani calls “serious” purposes relatively than easy touchdown pages or branding websites. Roughly 12% have created e-commerce platforms in segments like grocery and attire, 10% have constructed fintech apps, 5–6% have developed B2B instruments, and 4–5% have launched psychological well being apps, he stated.
Roughly 45% of Rocket.new’s customers are constructing cellular apps and 55% are constructing web sites, Virani stated. He added that many customers construct a web site on Lovable or Replit, then flip to Rocket.new to generate a local cellular app by integrating with their current Supabase backend.
The platform combines massive language fashions from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google’s Gemini with Rocket.new’s personal deep studying programs, that are educated on proprietary datasets from DhiWise.
“Our underlying architecture is completely different from what Lovable, Bolt, and everyone is doing,” Virani informed TechCrunch.
Producing the primary utility takes about 25 minutes — a lot slower than most vibe-coding instruments, which normally produce outcomes inside three. However in our early testing, Rocket.new delivered a extra complete consumer expertise, with all important modules included.
Rocket.new presents a free trial capped at a million tokens. After that, customers pay a month-to-month subscription beginning at $25 for 5 million tokens.
This mannequin successfully discourages hobbyists, whereas giving Rocket.new a wholesome gross margin of fifty–55% — a determine it goals to lift to 60–70% throughout the subsequent few months.
The U.S. is Rocket.new’s largest market, contributing 26% of income, adopted by Europe at 15–20% and India at 10%. To raised serve its American customers, the startup is establishing a U.S. headquarters in Palo Alto.
Virani famous that Rocket.new’s early traction was natural, pushed by word-of-mouth and viral social posts. With recent seed funding, the startup is trying to sharpen its go-to-market playbook, deepen its presence in key markets, and speed up work on proprietary fashions and R&D.
“We saw a clear gap between the magic of AI code generation and the reality of making that code production-ready,” Kartik Gupta, Investor at Salesforce Ventures, informed TechCrunch over e mail. “Rocket.new is purpose-built to solve this problem of iteration, maintenance, and deployment at enterprise scale.”
Rocket.new at present has a 58-member group, primarily in Surat, and expects to double its engineering and product workers in India over the following 12 months to help progress.
