This Startup Raised $15 Million to Revolutionize AI-Powered App Development from Natural Language

The Rise of AI-Powered App Development

In 2025, an Indian startup named Rocket.new has rapidly positioned itself at the forefront of the AI-driven software development revolution. Funded with a substantial $15 million seed round led by Salesforce Ventures and supplemented by investors including Accel and Together Fund, Rocket.new aims to disrupt the vibe-coding market segment by enabling users to create full production-ready applications — not just simple prototypes — through natural language prompts. Within just a few months of its beta platform launch in June 2025, Rocket.new has amassed over 400,000 users from 180 countries worldwide, including more than 10,000 paying subscribers. The startup has recorded $4.5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and projects explosive growth to $20-25 million ARR by the end of 2025, eyeing $60-70 million by mid-2026.

The Strategic Origins: From Surat to Global Ambitions

Rocket.new’s foundation story diverges from India’s typical tech startup hotspots of Bangalore or Hyderabad. Instead, the company was launched from Surat — a city renowned globally for its diamond polishing and textile industries but lesser known for technology entrepreneurship. This choice reflects the founders’ unique vision and commitment to decentralizing innovation beyond conventional regional ecosystems.

The founding trio, consisting of Vishal Virani (CEO), Rahul Shingala, and Deepak Dhanak, leveraged lessons from their prior venture, DhiWise, which centered on improving developer workflows and productivity. By pivoting from tooling that served developers to a platform empowering creators largely through AI, they established Rocket.new to tackle broader, more complex problems in software product development.

Core Philosophy: Tackling the “Day Two” Challenge

Virani frames Rocket.new’s mission around solving the persistent challenges organizations face beyond the initial app creation phase. Whereas most tools focus on “day one” tasks—early development and prototyping—Rocket.new emphasizes “day two,” meaning long-term iteration, scaling, deployment, and maintenance. The startup envisions building a comprehensive agentic system: an intelligent AI-driven layer that not only codes apps and webpages on demand from natural language but also autonomously conducts competitive market research, formulates product development strategies, and facilitates scaling decisions typically handled by product managers.

This holistic approach aims to streamline the entire application lifecycle by enabling product and development teams to rely heavily on AI-generated insights and automated workflows, reducing manual effort and accelerating time to market.

Founders of Rocket.new:

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Rocket.new was founded by a trio of visionary entrepreneurs from Surat, India, each bringing complementary expertise and a shared ambition to revolutionize software development through artificial intelligence.

Vishal Virani — Chief Executive Officer

Image Credits: Vishal Virani LinkedIn

Vishal Virani leads Rocket.new as its CEO, steering the company's strategic direction and growth. With a background in technology and product management, Virani previously co-founded DhiWise, a startup focused on improving developer workflows. His vision for Rocket.new emphasizes not just rapid app creation but solving the comprehensive "day two" challenges of product scalability, iteration, and maintenance through a sophisticated AI-driven agentic system. Virani’s leadership is marked by a bold ambition to democratize complex app development and bring AI-powered coding to a global audience.

Rahul Shingala — Co-Founder

Image Credits: Rahul Shingala LinkedIn

Rahul Shingala brings crucial technical and operational expertise to Rocket.new. As a co-founder, he has been instrumental in designing the platform’s underlying architecture and engineering scalable AI solutions that integrate large language models with proprietary deep learning algorithms. His work ensures that Rocket.new delivers production-ready code that meets enterprise-quality standards while maintaining a user-friendly experience.

Deepak Dhanak — Co-Founder

Image Credits: Deepak Dhanak LinkedIn

Deepak Dhanak complements the founding team with his strengths in AI research, data science, and product innovation. He played a pivotal role in curating and training Rocket.new’s proprietary datasets and AI models originating from DhiWise's earlier initiatives. Dhanak’s deep understanding of AI’s capabilities and limitations enables Rocket.new to innovate aggressively while ensuring practicability and scalability in real-world software development.

Together, the founders leverage their technical prowess, entrepreneurial spirit, and deep understanding of developer needs to propel Rocket.new's rapid rise. Their collective goal is to create a comprehensive AI ecosystem that transforms how software is developed — shifting from manually writing code to effortlessly generating full production applications through natural language.

Platform Overview: Comprehensive AI-Powered Application Creation

Image Credits: rocket.new

Rocket.new offers developers and non-technical users alike a powerful platform that translates natural language descriptions or imported designs (e.g., from Figma) into fully functional, scalable web and mobile applications. Unlike traditional vibe-coding tools that require users to specify every feature or page incrementally, Rocket.new enables users to describe their entire product vision in a single prompt. The platform then conducts extensive AI-assisted research and contextualization of the problem domain, generates an optimized user experience (UX) and interface design (UI), drafts high-quality SEO-friendly copy, and writes production-grade code compatible with popular frameworks such as React, Next.js, and Flutter.

The platform instantly configures backend infrastructure like database schemas and authentication, dynamically integrated with services such as Supabase. For users, this means a nearly turnkey solution where launching backend-ready, scalable apps happens with minimal manual coding or setup, all from the simplicity of natural language prompts.

Technology Differentiators: AI Synergies Driving Innovation

At its foundation, Rocket combines multiple state-of-the-art AI models, including large language models from AI leaders Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google's Gemini, augmented by Rocket.new’s proprietary deep learning architectures built upon extensive datasets developed during their DhiWise days. This multi-model ensemble facilitates unparalleled capabilities in understanding user intent, contextualizing competitive markets, and generating code that is not only functional but production-ready.

Rocket.new’s architectural innovations differentiate it profoundly from rival platforms like Lovable, Cursor, and Bolt. Instead of merely spitballing rapid but shallow prototype code, Rocket.new prioritizes completeness, maintainability, and scalability, resulting in a longer initial generation time (approximately 25 minutes versus the typical 3 minutes or less of competitors) but producing far richer, integrated applications with all essential modules and features included from the outset.

User Base and Application Ecosystem

Since launch, Rocket.new has served a diverse global audience ranging from product managers and solopreneurs to front-end developers. Its user base includes personnel from major companies such as Meta, PayPal, KPMG, PwC, and Times Internet who use the platform for both experimentation and production use cases.

Analyses reveal that approximately 80% of applications developed on Rocket.new qualify as serious projects rather than simple landing pages or branding sites. Rocket.new users primarily develop full-fledged applications rather than quick prototypes or simple branding websites. Approximately 80% of applications are substantial projects. These span a variety of business verticals, showcasing Rocket.new’s flexibility and broad industry application.

Breakdown of User Applications by TypeApplication Type
Percentage of Projects
Example Use Cases
E-commerce platforms
12%
Grocery, Apparel online stores
Fintech applications
10%
Payment gateways, financial dashboards
Business-to-Business (B2B) tools
5-6%
SaaS tools, productivity apps
Mental health and wellness apps
4-5%
Therapy support, wellness trackers
Other / miscellaneous
Remaining %
Various custom web and mobile apps

User workflows are equally varied, with around 45% developing mobile apps and 55% focusing on websites. Many users create websites initially on platforms like Lovable or Replit, then leverage Rocket.new to generate native mobile applications seamlessly integrated with existing backends such as Supabase, showcasing Rocket.new’s strength as a complementary extension within multi-tool environments.

Business Model: Token-Based Subscription for Scalability and Sustainability

The company’s pricing structure reflects its focus on professional and enterprise user segments. New users receive a free trial with access to one million tokens, which can be expended powering app generation and feature use. Post-trial, the pricing starts at $25 per month for five million tokens, creating a pay-as-you-go model that scales with application complexity and usage intensity.

This model deters casual hobbyists while encouraging serious adoption and development. Current gross margins stand solidly between 50-55%, with goals to increase profitability to 60-70% as scaling and operational efficiencies improve.

Rocket.new Pricing Plans: Flexible Options for Every Developer

Rocket.new offers a range of subscription plans designed to accommodate different levels of usage, from beginners trying out the platform to power users building complex applications daily. The plans are based on a token system, where tokens fuel app generation, feature use, and backend resources.

Feature
Starter
Personal
Rocket
Booster
Price (Monthly)
Free
$25
$50
$100
Tokens Included
1M tokens
5M tokens
10.5M tokens (5% bonus)
22M tokens (10% bonus)
Project Privacy
Public projects only
Private projects
Private projects
Private projects
Custom Domains
No
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Code Download
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Remove Rocket Branding
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Opt Out of Data Training
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Templates
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes

Market Reach and Expansion Strategy

Geographically, Rocket.new generates the largest portion of its revenue from the United States, which contributes 26% of overall income. Europe follows with 15-20%, while India comprises approximately 10%. To deepen penetration within the U.S. market and enhance support for American clients, Rocket.new is establishing a U.S. headquarters in Palo Alto, California — center stage to the global technology ecosystem.

Growth has been predominantly organic so far, fueled by word-of-mouth, evangelism, and viral social media traction. The company plans to develop more aggressive go-to-market tactics enabled by fresh funding to accelerate customer acquisition, particularly in competitive Western markets.

Investor Perspective: Bridging AI Promise and Enterprise Reality

Salesforce Ventures Investor Kartik Gupta emphasizes Rocket.new’s unique ability to close a critical gap: many AI coding tools produce impressive demos or simple code snippets but fall short in delivering production-ready, maintainable software that enterprises can deploy and iterate at scale. Rocket.new’s entire architecture and business model are purpose-built to solve these systematic challenges, aiming to become the backbone of next-generation enterprise software creation.

Concluding: Democratizing App Development for the Next Generation

Rocket.new currently employs 58 team members concentrated primarily in Surat, with concrete plans to double engineering and product personnel within the next 12 months. This expansion will support platform enhancements, proprietary AI model R&D, and comprehensive service offerings — all designed to maintain growth momentum and sustain high-quality innovation.  Rocket.new stands as a compelling harbinger of the future of software innovation, merging natural language AI, cutting-edge large language models, and intelligent backend orchestration into a seamless platform that transforms ideas into real products. By lowering traditional barriers to complex app development, Rocket.new empowers startups, enterprises, and creators globally to move rapidly from concept to launch with scalable, production-ready applications — heralding a new era in vibe-coding technology and AI-driven product creation.