Rocket.new Secures $15M Investment from Accel and Salesforce Ventures
Rocket.new, an innovative Indian startup, has successfully secured $15 million in a seed funding round led by Salesforce Ventures. This funding will support the company’s mission to revolutionize app development by enabling users to create fully functional applications through natural-language prompts. With over 400,000 users worldwide and a growing annual recurring revenue, Rocket.new aims to outpace competitors like Lovable and Bolt by offering a more comprehensive solution for app creation.
Rapid Growth and Ambitious Goals
Since launching its platform in beta just three months ago, Rocket.new has quickly gained traction, amassing over 400,000 users, including more than 10,000 paid subscribers across 180 countries. The startup has reported an impressive annual recurring revenue of $4.5 million, with aspirations to scale this figure to between $20 million and $25 million by the end of the year. Co-founder and CEO Vishal Virani expressed confidence in reaching $60 million to $70 million by June of next year. The startup, based in Surat—a city known for its diamond and textile industries—marks a strategic pivot from the founders’ previous venture, DhiWise, which focused on developer workflows.
Innovative Approach to App Development
Rocket.new is positioning itself as a pioneering platform in the app development landscape. Virani describes it as the first “vibe solution platform,” emphasizing its focus on addressing not only immediate needs but also long-term challenges in app development. The startup aims to create a comprehensive system that leverages artificial intelligence to facilitate not just app and website creation but also competitive research and product development. This approach seeks to eliminate the traditional need for product managers, allowing organizations to streamline their development processes through natural-language prompts.
The platform has already generated half a million applications, attracting a diverse user base that includes product managers, solopreneurs, and front-end developers. Notably, 80% of users are creating what Virani terms “serious” applications, with 12% developing e-commerce platforms and 10% focusing on fintech solutions. The platform’s user demographics reveal that 45% are building mobile apps while 55% are creating websites, showcasing its versatility in catering to various development needs.
Technological Edge and Market Strategy
Rocket.new combines advanced language models from industry leaders like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google’s Gemini with its proprietary deep learning systems. This unique architecture sets it apart from competitors like Lovable and Bolt. Although generating the first application takes about 25 minutes—longer than many vibe-coding tools—the platform offers a more comprehensive user experience, ensuring that all essential modules are included.
The startup’s pricing model includes a free trial capped at one million tokens, followed by a subscription starting at $25 per month for five million tokens. This structure effectively targets serious developers while maintaining a healthy gross margin of 50% to 55%, with plans to increase this to 60% to 70% in the coming months. The U.S. market is currently Rocket.new’s largest, accounting for 26% of its revenue, followed by Europe and India.
Future Plans and Team Expansion
With the recent funding, Rocket.new is poised to enhance its market presence and accelerate research and development efforts. Virani noted that the startup’s initial growth has been largely organic, driven by word-of-mouth and viral social media engagement. To better serve its American clientele, Rocket.new is establishing a headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
The company currently employs 58 team members, primarily based in Surat, and plans to double its engineering and product staff in India over the next year to support its ambitious growth trajectory. Investors, including Kartik Gupta from Salesforce Ventures, recognize the startup’s potential to bridge the gap between AI code generation and the practicalities of making that code production-ready, positioning Rocket.new as a key player in the evolving landscape of app development.
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