Ema, a startup that builds teams of AI agents to automate corporate processes in HR, IT, and finance, has raised $77 million in a Series B funding round. The round was led by Bengaluru-based venture firm Creaegis, with existing investors Accel, Section 32, and Prosus increasing their stakes. The financing brings Ema's total funding to $140 million and more than quadruples its valuation from its last round in 2024. Ema declined to disclose its latest valuation. The company confirmed the round consisted entirely of primary equity, with no debt or secondary transactions.
The raise lands as AI increasingly competes for spending that businesses have historically directed toward enterprise software and IT services. Startups, major AI labs, and established software companies are all vying for that spending. Ema, founded in 2023 by former Google and Coinbase executive Surojit Chatterjee and ex-Okta executive Souvik Sen, both based in the Bay Area, is working to expand its position in that market. The startup deploys technology it calls AI employees, systems that coordinate multiple AI agents to carry out multi-step business processes across a company's existing applications rather than handling one task at a time.
Chatterjee expects that model to eventually lessen companies' reliance on traditional software products, including software-as-a-service offerings. Ema first wraps around an enterprise's existing applications, he said, before customers can reduce their dependence on some of those products and in some cases replace them outright. He said many of Ema's customers are already on the way to replacing large SaaS applications completely, removing their dependency on them because those products are mostly becoming like a database. Chatterjee does not view the frontier AI labs as direct competitors, telling TechCrunch that Ema's software can draw on more than 150 models, including frontier and open source models, while the startup focuses on the domain knowledge, integrations, and orchestration needed to automate business processes end-to-end. He said progress in frontier models is beneficial to Ema. Anthropic has expanded efforts to bring Claude into companies' core operations, including financial and legal work, while OpenAI has established teams of forward-deployed engineers who work alongside customers to put AI into production.
Ema says its approach is gaining traction, with more than 50 active enterprise deals, over 1 million active enterprise users, and more than 5 million actions and queries handled. Its customers include NTT DATA, Hitachi, ADP, PwC, Google, KPMG, Wipro, and Microsoft. Over the past two years, Ema said its revenue has grown 50-fold, while revenue bookings have surpassed $150 million. Chatterjee said the bookings figure covers the total value of multiyear contracts, including two- and three-year deals, rather than annual recurring revenue. He declined to disclose the startup's current annualized revenue run rate.
Chatterjee said more than 90% of Ema's customers have expanded beyond their initial use case, with some deploying the technology across dozens of workflows. He put the startup's net dollar retention rate at around 180%, meaning existing customers are spending substantially more with Ema over time. Ema is also looking beyond software itself. Chatterjee said AI can take over some of the implementation, integration, and consulting work that companies have traditionally paid IT services firms to perform around enterprise software. He said many services companies are working with Ema and are dramatically changing or disrupting their own business models because they understand the human-forward model may not be the best model going forward.
Even as it takes on work traditionally handled by software and services providers, Ema has maintained gross margins close to 80%, according to Chatterjee, who noted the startup requires less human support as its AI systems learn from deployments. Ema does not charge customers based on software seats or the number of AI tokens they consume. Instead, Chatterjee said, its pricing is tied to the completion of tasks and business outcomes. Much of the new capital will go toward expanding go-to-market operations, particularly sales and marketing, after the company spent its first years largely building the product.
Ema is headquartered in Mountain View and has grown to nearly 200 employees, with offices in Bengaluru, London, and Vancouver. The startup has so far focused primarily on customers in the U.S. and Europe, but now plans to expand into new markets over the next year, particularly across Asia-Pacific, South America, and parts of the Middle East.
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