Thinking Machines Lab launches Inkling, an open-weight multimodal reasoning model

Emergent hits $1.5B valuation on $130M Series C, reaches $100M ARR

Mukund Jha, CEO of Emergent, announced a $130 million Series C round at a $1.5 billion valuation. The company has crossed $100 million ARR and serves 200,000 customers globally.

Emergent's core product is a no-code platform that lets non-technical business owners build and deploy production-grade applications—custom CRMs, ERPs, inventory systems—using natural language descriptions. Nearly 80% of Emergent's user base is non-technical. The company positions itself as an operating system for small and medium businesses to become AI-native.

Geographic distribution and customer profile

Revenue splits evenly across three regions: one-third from North America, one-third from Europe, one-third from Asia. The user base spans hospitals, factories, travel agencies, and other small business verticals. Most customers are traditionally running operations on email, WhatsApp, and spreadsheets, then digitizing through Emergent.

Jha frames the addressable market as businesses skipping the SaaS cycle entirely and moving directly to AI-native tools. Smaller, more agile operators are the early adopters—they understand their domain well and have flexibility to build custom tooling rather than conforming to packaged software.

Model routing and cost abstraction

Emergent abstracts away model selection from users. The platform includes a model router that decides which model to use per request—switching to open-source or cheaper models for simpler tasks, using frontier models where needed. As test-time compute costs rise across the frontier, Jha says there's a "sweet spot of affordability and price and value" that a mixture approach captures well.

Employment and AI adoption sentiment

Jha observes that employment is rising in the short term, particularly in software development, because as software becomes cheaper to build, demand for it accelerates. He notes significant AI enthusiasm in India specifically, citing developer adoption of tools like Codex and adoption momentum at recent AI summits.

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Note on segment metadata: The segment title references Thinking Machines Lab launching Inkling, an open-weight multimodal reasoning model. This announcement appears only as a brief news mention at the end of the transcript ("Thinking Machines just launched a new model and it's called Inkling. Inkling reasons efficiently across text image and audio modalities. We are making the full weights available"). The substantive interview is with Mukund Jha about Emergent's Series C and platform strategy. The locked structural facts identify Mira Murati as a founder of Thinking Machines, but she does not appear in the transcript.