Rocket.new, an Indian startup building an AI-powered app development platform, has raised $15 million in a seed round led by Salesforce Ventures, and has acquired a viral atmosphere rival, Bolt, by allowing users to build fully-created apps from natural langueage prompts rather than just a quick prototype.
Accel and Together Fund joined Salesforce Ventures at All-Equity Seed Round, which takes place just three months after Rocket.new launched its platform in beta in June.
Since its debut, the startup has surpassed 400,000 users in 180 countries, including over 400,000 paid subscribers, reaching recurring revenue of $4.5 million per year. Co-founder and CEO Vishal Virani (pictured above, center) said in an exclusive interview.
Based in Surat, a city famous for its diamonds and textiles but far from India’s regular high-tech hub, Villani has partnered with Rahul Singala and Deepak Danak to launch Rocket.new. The startup shows a pivot from DhiWise, a previous venture focused on developer workflows.
“We’re building our first Vibe solution platform, and this is about solving the problems on the second day, not just the problems on the first day,” Virani told TechCrunch.
The 16-week-old startup aims to become a comprehensive agent system that not only builds apps and websites, but also conducts competitive research and product development and utilizes AI to eliminate the need for product managers.
“Our entire agent system helps organizations not only generate source code, but even in facilities that scale their products, to build all sorts of features around their products by providing natural language prompts,” Virani argued.
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The current model, which Virani calls version 0.3, has already built half a million applications and attracted product managers, solopreneurs and front-end developers. It also counts users from companies such as Meta, PayPal, KPMG, PWC, Times Internet, and relies on the platform for personal projects.
Around 80% of Rocket.New users have built what Virani has called “serious” applications so far, rather than simple landing pages or branding sites. He said about 12% have created e-commerce platforms in segments like groceries and apparel, 10% have built fintech apps, 5-6% have developed B2B tools, and 4-5% have launched mental health apps.
Around 45% of Rocket.New users build mobile apps, and 55% build websites, Virani said. He added that many users will build their websites with Lovable or Replit, then go to rocket.new to integrate with the existing Supabase backend to generate native mobile apps.
The platform combines large-scale language models from humanity, Openai, and Google’s Gemini with Rocket.New’s proprietary deep learning system and is trained with DHIWise’s own dataset.
“The architecture that underlies our foundation is completely different from what we love, what bolts, what everyone does,” Virani told TechCrunch.
It takes about 25 minutes to generate the first application. This is much slower than most vibe coding tools, and usually results are produced within three. However, in early testing, Rocket.new provided a more comprehensive user experience, including all the key modules.
Rocket.New offers a free trial, capped with 1 million tokens. Users then pay a monthly subscription starting at $25 for 5 million tokens.
This model effectively discourages enthusiasts, but gives Rocket.new a healthy total margin of 50-55%. This is intended to rise to 60-70% within the next few months.
The US is Rocket.new’s biggest market, contributing to 26% of revenue, with Europe at 15-20% and India at 10%. To provide services suitable for American users, the startup has established its US headquarters in Palo Alto.
Virani pointed out that Rocket.new’s early traction was organic driven by word of mouth and viral social posts. With fresh seed funding, startups are looking to sharpen their market-going playbooks, deepen their presence in key markets, and accelerate their own model and R&D work.
“We saw a clear gap between the magic of AI code generation and the reality that we are ready to create that code,” Salesforce Ventures investor Kartik Gupta told TechCrunch in an email. “Rocket.New is dedicated to solving iteration, maintenance and deployment issues at an enterprise scale.”
Rocket.New currently has a team of 58 members, primarily in Surat, and we hope to double India’s engineering and product staff over the next 12 months to support its growth.
