Rocket.new, one of India’s first vibe-coding startups, snags $15M from Accel, Salesforce Ventures (techcrunch.com)

Rocket.new announced a $15M seed round led by Salesforce Ventures, with Accel and Together Fund joining, to scale its AI-powered "vibe-coding" platform that generates production-ready apps from natural-language prompts. Launched in beta three months ago, the Surat-based startup already claims 400,000 users (10,000+ paid), $4.5M ARR and half a million apps created on version 0.3. Rocket.new is positioning itself against fast prototype tools like Lovable, Cursor and Bolt by focusing on "day two" needs—iteration, maintenance and deployment—with plans to grow ARR to $20–25M by year-end and $60–70M by next June, open a U.S. HQ in Palo Alto, and double engineering headcount. Technically, Rocket.new stitches Anthropic, OpenAI and Google Gemini LLMs with its own deep-learning models trained on proprietary DhiWise data to produce end-to-end, production-grade mobile apps and websites (45% mobile, 55% web). Generation is slower (~25 minutes vs ~3 for rivals) but yields more complete builds and essential modules; users often convert sites built elsewhere into native apps via Supabase integration. The platform is moving toward an agentic system to automate product research and development, reducing reliance on product managers. A token-based pricing model (free 1M tokens, then $25/month for 5M) supports healthy gross margins (50–55%, targeting 60–70%), signaling a push from viral demos to scalable enterprise-grade AI app development.