Indian AI-Powered App Development Startup Rocket.new Secures $15M to Compete with Vibe-Coding Platforms
A startup named Rocket.new, based out of Surat, India, has secured $15 million in a seed funding round led by Salesforce Ventures. This investment will propel the company to challenge rivals such as Lovable, Cursor, and Bolt in the realm of AI-driven app development platforms. Unlike these competitors, Rocket.new enables users to create full, production-ready applications from natural language prompts, not just quick prototypes.
Accel, Together Fund, and Salesforce Ventures participated in this all-equity seed round, which comes only three months after Rocket.new’s beta launch in June. Since its inception, the startup has amassed over 400,000 users across 180 countries, with more than 10,000 subscribers willing to pay for the service. The company aims to scale its annual recurring revenue from the current $4.5 million to $20–$25 million by year’s end and further to $60–$70 million by June next year.
Co-founder and CEO Vishal Virani shared that Rocket.new aspires to develop a comprehensive agentic system that leverages AI not only for app and website creation but also for competitive research, product development, and eliminating the need for product managers. The platform’s goal is to facilitate organizations in building various functions around their products, going beyond merely generating source code and offering a facility to scale their product through natural language prompts.
The current model, referred to as version 0.3, has already built half a million applications and attracted users including product managers, solopreneurs, and front-end developers from companies like Meta, PayPal, KPMG, PwC, and Times Internet. Approximately 80% of the users have created what Virani calls “serious” applications rather than simple landing pages or branding sites.
Rocket.new offers a free trial with a limit of one million tokens. After the trial period, users pay a monthly subscription starting at $25 for five million tokens. This pricing structure discourages hobbyists and guarantees Rocket.new a healthy gross margin of 50–55%, which they aim to increase to 60–70% in the coming months.
The U.S. is Rocket.new’s largest market, contributing 26% of revenue, followed by Europe at 15–20% and India at 10%. To cater better to its American users, the startup plans to establish a U.S. headquarters in Palo Alto.
Rocket.new’s early success was primarily organic, driven by word-of-mouth and viral social posts. With fresh funding, the company aims to refine its go-to-market strategy, strengthen its presence in key markets, and accelerate work on proprietary models and R&D.
Investor Kartik Gupta from Salesforce Ventures stated, “We saw a clear gap between the magic of AI code generation and the reality of making that code production-ready. Rocket.new is purpose-built to solve this problem of iteration, maintenance, and deployment at enterprise scale.”
Currently, Rocket.new employs a team of 58, primarily based in Surat, and anticipates doubling its engineering and product staff in India over the next 12 months to support growth.
