Rocket.new, an Indian startup building an AI-powered app development platform, has raised 15 million dollars in a seed funding round. The investment was led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Accel and Together Fund. This all-equity round arrives just three months after the company launched its platform in beta.
The startup aims to compete with other AI coding tools like Lovable, Cursor, and Bolt. Its key differentiator is the ability to build full, production-ready applications from natural-language prompts, moving beyond just creating quick prototypes.
Since its beta debut in June, Rocket.new has experienced rapid growth. It has crossed 400,000 users in 180 countries, including over 10,000 paid subscribers. The company has reached 4.5 million dollars in annual recurring revenue and is targeting 20 to 25 million dollars by the end of the year.
The company was founded in Surat, a city not traditionally known as a tech hub, by Vishal Virani, Rahul Shingala, and Deepak Dhanak. This new venture represents a pivot from their previous company, DhiWise, which focused on developer workflows.
The founders describe their vision as building a comprehensive agentic system. This system would use AI not only to build apps and websites but also to conduct competitive research and handle product development, potentially eliminating the need for product managers.
The current platform, version 0.3, has already been used to build half a million applications. Its user base includes product managers, solo entrepreneurs, and front-end developers from companies like Meta, PayPal, and KPMG, who often use it for personal projects.
About 80 percent of the applications built on the platform are considered serious projects rather than simple landing pages. User creations include e-commerce platforms, fintech apps, B2B tools, and mental health applications. Roughly 45 percent of users build mobile apps, while 55 percent build websites.
Rocket.new combines large language models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google’s Gemini with its own proprietary deep learning systems. The initial app generation takes about 25 minutes, which is longer than some rivals, but aims to deliver a more complete and production-ready user experience.
The platform operates on a freemium model. A free trial is capped at one million tokens, after which subscriptions start at 25 dollars per month for five million tokens. This pricing helps the company maintain a gross margin of 50 to 55 percent, which it hopes to increase.
The United States is Rocket.new’s largest market, contributing 26 percent of revenue. Europe follows with 15 to 20 percent, and India accounts for 10 percent. To better serve its American users, the startup is establishing a US headquarters in Palo Alto.
The company’s early growth was driven organically by word-of-mouth and social media. The new funding will be used to refine its market strategy, deepen its presence in key regions, and accelerate research and development on its proprietary models.
An investor from Salesforce Ventures stated that Rocket.new is purpose-built to bridge the gap between AI code generation and the reality of making that code production-ready at an enterprise scale.
Rocket.new currently employs 58 people, primarily based in Surat. It plans to double its engineering and product teams in India over the next year to support its continued expansion.