Runable is trying to move the AI agent conversation past a familiar starting point: building websites and apps. The Indian startup has raised $21 million as it works on tools meant to help small businesses not only create an online presence, but also attract customers and grow.
The Bengaluru-based company is positioning itself around outcomes for nontechnical business owners. Instead of asking users to piece together website creation, deployment, analytics, advertising and search visibility across multiple products, Runable wants its agent to handle more of that work from a single interface.
A funding round aimed at the next step after building
Runable's Series A was co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners. Existing investors Together Fund and Array VC also participated in the all-equity, primary round.
Co-founder and CEO Umesh Kumar told TechCrunch that the investment valued Runable at $65 million after investment. The company was founded in 2025 by Kumar and co-founder Saksham Sarda, and now has a 15-person team.
The startup began in a different lane. Kumar and Sarda originally built Runable as an AI infrastructure company focused on browser technology for large-scale data scraping. User behavior pushed the company elsewhere: people increasingly asked its browser-based agent to create slide decks, websites and similar materials. That demand helped steer Runable toward a more general-purpose AI agent.
The shift appears to have brought early commercial momentum. Kumar said Runable reached a $2 million annualized revenue run rate within three weeks of launching payments in March.
From websites and apps to customer acquisition
Runable's current agent can create websites, apps, presentations and other content from natural language prompts. It also manages parts of the supporting infrastructure, including deployment and analytics.
The new emphasis is what the company describes as the "grow" side of a business. That means expanding the agent's role into tasks such as running ad campaigns, managing social media, handling SEO and improving how a business appears in AI chatbot results.
Kumar framed the opportunity around practical business needs rather than developer tooling. As he put it to TechCrunch:
"In the end, a business doesn't require Codex or Claude Code or anything. They require real outcomes. If I am paying an agency $10,000 to run my Google Ads, can someone come in and do it for me for a lower price? That's where Runable comes in."
The target user is not primarily a developer who wants help writing code in local files. Kumar said tools including OpenAI's Codex or Anthropic's Claude Code can be better suited for that kind of work. Runable is instead aiming at small business owners who may not want to configure the many services needed to turn an AI-created website or app into a working business.
Runable's users and markets
Kumar said Runable has about 1.7 million registered users. Its largest markets include the U.S., UK and Japan, and the platform also has users in Brazil.
The company is increasingly concentrating on the U.S., UK and Japan. Kumar said Runable expects Japan to become one of its top markets alongside the U.S. as soon as next month.
Usage is also heavy. Kumar said users consumed more than 1 trillion tokens over the last 90 days, with about 60% to 70% of that activity coming from paying customers.
That level of AI use creates a business challenge. Kumar acknowledged that Runable currently has negative gross margins, partly because it subsidizes AI usage for customers. The company is using a mix of models, including work on its own, and expects lower inference costs to improve its economics over time.
"We are seeing this path where you can provide the same quality of inference at almost 10x less cost," Kumar told TechCrunch.
The hard part is making agents act, not just draft
Runable operates in a crowded market. Its landscape includes AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, coding platforms including Cursor, Lovable and Replit, and general-purpose agents such as Manus and Genspark. Kumar described Manus and Genspark as Runable's closest competitors because they target similar users and markets.
The company's differentiation depends on whether it can connect AI-generated work to real business distribution. Building a website is useful, but a small business still needs analytics, advertising accounts, marketing campaigns and visibility across search, social media and AI chatbots.
A TechCrunch test showed both the promise and the limits. The publication asked Runable to create and deploy a website for a fictional coffee subscription business, set up analytics and attract its first 100 visitors using an advertising budget of $25. Runable built the site and prepared an ad campaign, but did not run the campaign because an advertising account needed to be connected first.
A similar test on Cursor ran into some of the same barriers. Cursor prepared an ad campaign, but needed access to a Meta Ads account and payment method, along with a third-party service for permanent website deployment. Runable handled more of the website infrastructure inside its platform, but it still needed an external ad account before spending the advertising budget.
Runable said one exception is currently available for ads on ChatGPT. The company said partnerships make that possible, though it declined to identify the partners and described those relationships as a "soft wedge."
What Runable's bet says about AI agents
The company is making a clear argument about where AI agents may go next. The first wave helped people generate code, pages, apps and marketing assets. Runable is betting the next wave will be judged by whether those assets produce business results.
For small businesses, the value is not necessarily in having one more creative tool. It is in reducing the number of steps between an idea, a published presence, measurement and customer acquisition. Runable's challenge is to prove that an AI agent can reliably bridge those steps while improving the economics of heavy AI usage.