Indian startup Runable has raised $21 million in Series A funding to expand its focus from building businesses to helping them grow. The round was co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Together Fund and Array VC. Runable, which was valued at $65 million post-money, is targeting small businesses in a competitive market that includes AI giants like Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as coding platforms such as Cursor and Replit. Runable’s co-founder and CEO, Umesh Kumar, said in an exclusive interview that the startup is shifting its focus to AI agents that can find customers, run ad campaigns, and manage social media for businesses. '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.'
Runable’s AI agent allows users to build websites, apps, and other content using natural language prompts while handling underlying infrastructure like deployment and analytics. The startup is now extending the agent into what it calls the 'grow' side of the business, aiming to run ad campaigns, manage social media, handle SEO, and optimize a business’s presence in AI chatbot results. Kumar noted that the goal is to help small business owners ask Runable to get a certain number of customers rather than separately setting up a website, analytics tools, advertising accounts, and marketing campaigns. Currently, Runable has about 1.7 million registered users, with the U.S., U.K., and Japan among its largest markets. The platform also has users in Brazil, though the startup is increasingly focusing on the first three and expects Japan to emerge alongside the U.S. as one of its top markets as soon as next month.
Runable’s challenge may be standing out as all top AI model companies it relies on are increasingly building agents of their own. Kumar argued that Runable’s advantage is handling the work required to produce an outcome for a small business—including infrastructure, analytics, and distribution—without requiring users to stitch together multiple services. In a brief test, TechCrunch asked the agent to build and deploy a website for a fictional coffee subscription business, set up analytics, and then attract its first 100 visitors with an advertising budget of $25. Runable built the site and prepared an ad campaign but stopped short of running it, saying an advertising account first needed to be connected. We ran a similar test on Cursor and encountered some of the same limitations. Cursor prepared an ad campaign but required access to a Meta Ads account and payment method, as well as a third-party service to permanently deploy the website. Runable handled more of the website infrastructure within its platform, but still required an external ad account before it could spend the advertising budget.
Source: techcrunch
