As artificial intelligence makes building websites and apps easier than ever, Indian startup Runable is betting on its next opportunity to find customers and help businesses grow. The startup has raised $21 million to expand in that direction.
The Series A was co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Together Fund and Array VC. Co-founder and CEO Umesh Kumar (pictured above, right) said in an exclusive interview that this all-equity primary funding values Runable at $65 million post-investment.
Founded in 2025, Runable targets small and medium-sized businesses in an increasingly crowded market that includes AI giants like Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as coding platforms like Cursor, Lovable, and Replit. But the Bangalore-based startup with a team of 15 people is looking beyond software creation with AI agents designed to find customers, run ad campaigns, create presentations, and drive business across search, social media, and AI chatbots.
“At the end of the day, business doesn’t need codexes or codexes or anything like that. It needs real results,” Kumar told TechCrunch. “If you’re paying an agency $10,000 to run Google ads, can someone come and run your ads for you at a lower price? That’s where Runable comes in.”
Kumar and co-founder Saksham Sarda (pictured above, left) originally founded Runable as an AI infrastructure startup, building browser technology to collect data at scale. But the duo noticed that users were increasingly asking browser-based agents to create things like slide decks and websites. This ultimately led the startup to pivot towards general purpose AI agents.
The move helped Runable go from zero to $2 million in annual revenue runrate within three weeks of starting payments in March, Kumar said.
Today, Runable’s agents allow users to build websites, apps, presentations, and other content using natural language prompts while handling some of the underlying infrastructure such as deployment and analysis. The startup is now expanding its agents into the so-called “growth” side of the business, aiming for tasks such as running advertising campaigns, managing social media, handling SEO, and optimizing a company’s presence in AI chatbot results.
Kumar told TechCrunch that the ultimate goal is to help small business owners ask Runable to acquire a certain number of customers, rather than setting up individual websites, analytics tools, ad accounts, and marketing campaigns.
Currently, Runable has about 1.7 million registered users, with the US, UK and Japan being its biggest markets, Kumar said. The platform also has users in Brazil, but the startup is increasingly focusing on the first three and expects Japan to emerge as one of its top markets alongside the US as early as next month.
A challenge beyond architecture
Kumar declined to reveal Runable’s current revenue or number of paying customers. Despite this, users have spent more than 1 trillion tokens in the past 90 days, with about 60% to 70% of that usage coming from paying customers, he said.
Kumar admits that Runable currently has negative gross margins, so its use comes at a price. Part of that is because the startup subsidizes its customers’ use of AI. Kumar said the startup is working on a variety of models, including some of its own, and hopes lower inference costs will help improve economics in the long run.
“We’re seeing this path to delivering the same quality of inference at almost a tenth of the cost,” Kumar told TechCrunch.
Runable’s larger challenge may be highlighted by the fact that all of the top AI modeling companies it relies on tend to build their own agents. But Kumar argued that the benefit of Runable is that it allows users to handle the infrastructure, analytics, delivery, and other work needed to produce results for small businesses without having to stitch together multiple services.
In a quick test of Runable, TechCrunch asked agents to build and deploy a website for a hypothetical coffee subscription business, set up analytics, and bring in their first 100 visitors with a $25 advertising budget. Runable built a site and set up an ad campaign, but stopped mid-run because it needed to connect an ad account first.
I ran similar tests with Cursor and encountered some of the same limitations. Cursor prepared an ad campaign, but needed a meta ad account, a payment method, and access to third-party services to permanently roll out the website. Runable handled much of the website’s infrastructure within its platform, but required an external ad account before spending any ad budget.
When asked about this limitation, Runable said that the feature that allows customers to advertise without having to connect their advertising account is currently available in ChatGPT’s ads. The company said it has partnerships that enable such advertising, but declined to identify them and described the relationships as “soft wedges.”
Kumar said Runable isn’t trying to beat coding agencies at its own game. For developers who work with local files or primarily write code, tools like OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code may be better suited, he said. However, Runable is targeted at non-technical small business owners who don’t want to configure the tools and services needed to make an AI-generated product work as a business.
General purpose agents such as Manus and GenSpark are considered Runable’s closest competitors because they target similar users and markets, Kumar said. Still, rather than focusing solely on building with AI, Runable aims to differentiate itself by using AI to help businesses discover customers.
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