Y Combinator Startup Podcast Building A Global AI Startup From India
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Mar 16, 2026 
Mukund Jha, Emergent co-founder and former Dunzo founder, joins Madhav Jha, Emergent co-founder and ex deep learning leader at Amazon. They dive into turning AI testing into coding agents. They talk about building for non-technical creators, live app creation, lean hiring in India, personalized software replacing SaaS, and helping niche builders launch real products worldwide.
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Second Movers Can Rebuild Around New Models
- Mukund Jha argued second movers can win in AI by rebuilding around new model capabilities instead of inheriting old assumptions.
- Emergent targeted production-ready apps while competitors optimized for frontend prototypes, then used influencer distribution to catch up fast.
Owning Infra Made Production Quality Possible
- Madhav Jha said production-ready app building required owning infrastructure, not just wrapping a model with prompts.
- Emergent built its own Kubernetes sandboxes, used the same infra for build and deploy, and added multi-agent memory that learns from prior sessions.
Powerful Agents Need A Gentle User Interface
- Emergent built an engineer-grade coding agent, then hid that complexity because non-technical users get intimidated by raw code views.
- Madhav Jha said even seeing a diff can panic users, so the company optimized for agent experience and simplified the interface.