Madhav Jha

Madhav Jha is the co-founder and CTO of Emergent, the AI-powered app creation platform he launched in 2024 alongside his twin brother Mukund. Born and raised in Bihar, India, Madhav and Mukund grew up in a household of modest means where access to computers and the internet was limited — a formative constraint that sharpened their conviction, once they found their way into technology, that software creation should be accessible to everyone, not just those with expensive educations or technical teams.

Madhav’s academic path took him into the deepest reaches of theoretical computer science. He completed a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science from Penn State University and subsequently served as a von Neumann Postdoctoral Fellow at Sandia National Laboratories — a prestigious appointment in the US national laboratory system for researchers working at the frontier of computational theory. He then joined Amazon, where he was a founding member of the research team that built and shipped Amazon SageMaker, the machine learning platform that has since become one of the most widely used ML infrastructure products in the world.

At Emergent, Madhav leads the technical architecture of a platform that uses multi-agent AI systems to produce full-stack, production-ready applications from natural language instructions. His background in theoretical computer science, machine learning research, and large-scale systems engineering informs an approach that has been described as genuinely different from competing tools: Emergent builds for production rather than prototypes, handling authentication, database integration, payment infrastructure, and deployment without requiring the user to understand the underlying systems.

Emergent reached £40 million in annualised recurring revenue within seven months of launch, crossing five million users in over 190 countries. The company raised £50 million in Series B funding in January 2026, co-led by Khosla Ventures and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Madhav has described the long-term vision as building infrastructure that enables a billion new builders — people who have never written a line of code — to turn their ideas into working software.