India's Vibe-Coding Startup Rocket.new Raises $15M Led by Accel and Salesforce Ventures

Rocket.new, an emerging Indian AI startup, has secured $15 million in seed funding led by Salesforce Ventures to compete with popular no-code platforms like Lovable, Cursor and Bolt. Unlike basic prototyping tools, Rocket.new's AI platform enables users to create complete, production-ready applications simply by describing their needs in natural language.

The funding round, which included participation from Accel and Together Fund, follows Rocket.new's public beta launch just three months prior in June. In this short timeframe, the platform has already attracted 400,000 global users across 180 countries, with over 10,000 paying subscribers generating $4.5 million in annual recurring revenue.

Co-founder and CEO Vishal Virani shared ambitious growth targets with TechCrunch: "We're projecting $20-25 million in ARR by year's end and $60-70 million by June 2025." The Surat-based team, operating outside India's traditional tech hubs, brings experience from their previous developer tools venture, DhiWise.

"We're building more than just a first-draft solution - we're solving the ongoing challenges of iteration and scaling that come after initial creation," Virani explained. The startup aims to evolve into a comprehensive "agentic system" that handles not only application development but also automated competitive research and product strategy, potentially reducing the need for traditional product management roles.

Early adoption metrics highlight Rocket.new's enterprise appeal, with users from major companies like Meta, PayPal and KPMG leveraging the platform for personal and professional projects. Unlike competitors whose users primarily create simple landing pages, approximately 80% of Rocket.new's customers are building complex applications across sectors including e-commerce (12%), fintech (10%), B2B tools (5-6%) and mental health solutions (4-5%).

The platform's technical foundation combines leading AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google Gemini with proprietary deep learning systems trained on DhiWise datasets. This unique architecture enables more comprehensive application generation compared to competitors, though at a slower initial build time of approximately 25 minutes versus the industry standard 3 minutes.

Rocket.new employs a token-based pricing model starting at $25/month for 5 million tokens after a free trial period. This approach effectively targets serious developers and businesses, contributing to the company's healthy 50-55% gross margins with plans to increase to 60-70% in coming months.

Currently serving a global user base with 26% of revenue from the U.S., 15-20% from Europe and 10% from India, Rocket.new is establishing a U.S. headquarters in Palo Alto to better support its largest market. The 58-person team, primarily based in Surat, plans to double its engineering and product staff over the next year to accelerate development of proprietary AI models and expansion into new markets.

Salesforce Ventures' Kartik Gupta highlighted Rocket.new's unique value proposition: "They're addressing the critical gap between AI-generated code and production-ready enterprise applications - solving the challenges of iteration, maintenance and deployment at scale."