Indian AI startup Runable has raised $21 million in a Series A round as it expands from AI-powered website and app creation into a more ambitious market: using autonomous agents to help small businesses find customers, run marketing campaigns and generate revenue.
The Bengaluru-based company said the funding round was co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, with existing investors Together Fund and Array VC also participating. The all-equity financing values Runable at $65 million after the investment, according to co-founder and CEO Umesh Kumar.
Founded in 2025, Runable is entering a crowded AI market dominated by companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic and coding platforms including Cursor, Lovable and Replit. But rather than competing solely to build better websites, applications or software from natural-language prompts, Runable is betting that the next stage of AI adoption will be about what happens after a product has been built.
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“In the end, a business doesn’t require Codex or Claude Code or anything. They require real outcomes,” Kumar told TechCrunch. “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.”
In the AI-agent market, generative AI has dramatically reduced the technical barriers to creating software, allowing people with limited coding experience to build websites, applications, and digital products. As those capabilities become increasingly commoditized, the competitive frontier is moving toward agents that can execute entire business processes rather than simply generate content or code.
Runable is positioning itself around that opportunity.
Its AI agent can already create websites, applications, presentations, and other digital assets through natural-language instructions while managing elements such as deployment and analytics. The company is now adding tools intended to help businesses acquire customers, including advertising, social-media management, search-engine optimization and efforts to improve how businesses appear in AI chatbot results.
The longer-term proposition is considerably broader than an AI website builder. Kumar wants business owners to be able to tell Runable how many customers they want and have the agent determine the digital infrastructure, advertising and distribution required to pursue that target.
That would place Runable closer to an AI-powered digital agency than a conventional software-development platform.
The company’s origins were different. Kumar and co-founder Saksham Sarda initially built Runable as an AI infrastructure company focused on browser technology capable of scraping data at scale. But customers began using the browser-based agent for tasks such as creating presentations and websites, prompting the founders to shift toward a general-purpose AI agent.
The pivot appears to have generated rapid early adoption. Kumar said Runable reached a $2 million annualized revenue run rate within three weeks of beginning to accept payments in March. The startup now claims about 1.7 million registered users, with the United States, United Kingdom and Japan among its largest markets. Brazil is another market where it has users, although the company is concentrating increasingly on the first three countries.
Runable’s growth, however, comes with a significant economic challenge.
Kumar declined to disclose current revenue or the number of paying customers, but said users consumed more than 1 trillion tokens during the past 90 days, with paying customers accounting for roughly 60% to 70% of that usage.
The company is currently operating with negative gross margins because it subsidizes AI inference for customers. That makes the economics of its agent business dependent partly on the continuing decline in the cost of running AI models.
Kumar said Runable is using several models and developing some of its own technology, explaining that improving inference efficiency could eventually make the economics considerably more attractive.
“We are seeing this path where you can provide the same quality of inference at almost 10x less cost,” he said.
That cost curve could prove decisive. AI agents that autonomously perform multi-step tasks can consume substantially more computing resources than conventional software, particularly when they browse the web, generate content, analyze information, interact with external services and repeatedly call AI models.
The business model therefore depends on Runable being able to capture enough value from customers to cover the cost of the underlying intelligence and infrastructure.
There is another challenge: the largest AI companies are moving in the same direction.
OpenAI and Anthropic are increasingly developing agents capable of executing tasks rather than merely responding to prompts. Coding platforms such as Cursor, meanwhile, are also expanding beyond code generation into broader software-development workflows.
Runable’s response is to focus less on the underlying model and more on the outcome.
For a developer who wants to work directly with code and local files, Kumar acknowledged that products such as OpenAI’s Codex or Anthropic’s Claude Code may be better suited. Runable is instead targeting small-business owners who may have little interest in configuring AI models, analytics platforms, hosting systems, advertising accounts, and marketing tools.
That matters because the small-business market is large but fragmented, and many companies still rely on agencies or freelancers for digital marketing and customer acquisition.
However, the concern lies in an AI agent’s ability to reliably take responsibility for those outcomes rather than simply produce the assets needed to pursue them.
A test by TechCrunch illustrates the gap. When asked to build and deploy a website for a fictional coffee-subscription company and attract its first 100 visitors with a $25 advertising budget, Runable created the site and prepared an advertising campaign but stopped before launching it because the user needed to connect an advertising account.
That limitation exposes one of the biggest obstacles facing autonomous business agents: AI can generate the work, but real-world execution often requires access to external platforms, payment systems, customer accounts, and permissions.
Runable said it can currently run advertising without users connecting their own advertising accounts for ads on ChatGPT, through partnerships it declined to identify.
The company describes those partnerships as a “soft wedge” into a much larger opportunity.
Its closest competitors, according to Kumar, include general-purpose agents such as Manus and Genspark. The distinction Runable wants to establish is that these products are primarily designed to perform tasks, while Runable is attempting to connect those tasks directly to business growth.
That is a potentially important shift in the AI-agent race.
The first phase of generative AI was largely about creating information: text, images, code and presentations. The next phase is about taking actions. The more commercially valuable agents may ultimately be those that can connect creation with distribution, customer acquisition and revenue generation.
Runable is betting that small businesses will pay for that entire chain rather than for another tool that merely makes it easier to build a website.
Its $21 million funding round gives the company capital to pursue that bet. If it succeeds, the competitive advantage may not come from having the best AI model. It may come from owning the layer that turns capable models into customers, sales, and recurring revenue for businesses that do not have the time or expertise to manage the technology themselves.