Runable raises $21M to push AI agents from building to growing businesses

As AI makes it easier than ever to build websites and apps, Indian startup Runable is betting the next opportunity lies in what comes after: finding customers and helping businesses grow. The company has raised $21 million in a Series A co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, with existing investors Together Fund and Array VC also participating; the all-equity, primary round valued Runable at $65 million post-money, co-founder and CEO Umesh Kumar said.

Founded in 2025, the 15-person, Bengaluru-based startup is targeting small businesses in a crowded market that includes AI giants like Anthropic and OpenAI and coding platforms such as Cursor, Lovable, and Replit, but is looking beyond software creation with an AI agent designed to find customers, run ad campaigns, create presentations, and promote businesses across search, social media, and AI chatbots. “In the end, a business doesn’t require Codex or Claude Code or anything. They require real outcomes,” Kumar told TechCrunch.

Kumar and co-founder Saksham Sarda originally founded Runable as an AI infrastructure startup building browser technology to scrape data at scale, but noticed users increasingly asking its browser-based agent to create things like slide decks and websites, which led to a pivot toward a general-purpose AI agent. The shift helped Runable go from zero to a $2 million annualized revenue run rate within three weeks of launching payments in March, Kumar said. The startup now has about 1.7 million registered users, with the U.S., U.K., and Japan among its largest markets and users also in Brazil, though it is increasingly focusing on the first three markets and expects Japan to emerge alongside the U.S. as one of its top markets as soon as next month. Kumar declined to disclose revenue or paying-customer counts but said users consumed more than 1 trillion tokens over the last 90 days, with 60% to 70% of that usage coming from paying customers — usage that comes at a cost, since Runable currently has negative gross margins partly because it subsidizes AI usage for customers, though Kumar expects falling inference costs to improve its economics over time.

In a brief TechCrunch test, Runable was asked to build and deploy a website for a fictional coffee subscription business, set up analytics, and attract its first 100 visitors with a $25 advertising budget; Runable built the site and prepared an ad campaign but stopped short of running it, saying an advertising account first needed to be connected — a limitation Runable said applies broadly except for ads on ChatGPT, where it has undisclosed partnerships it calls a “soft wedge.” A similar test on Cursor hit some of the same limits, requiring a connected Meta Ads account and a third-party service to permanently deploy the website. Kumar said Runable isn’t trying to beat coding agents like Codex or Claude Code at their own game, and instead targets nontechnical small-business owners who don’t want to configure multiple tools themselves; he named general-purpose agents Manus and Genspark as Runable’s closest competitors.

Why it matters

Runable’s bet that “outcomes” rather than code generation is the next battleground for AI agents tests whether small businesses will pay a startup — rather than assembling their own stack of AI tools — to handle marketing and customer acquisition end to end.