Runable Raises $21M Series A Funding to Help Small Businesses Grow with AI Agents

Runable hits $21M to bet AI agents can go from building businesses to growing them

As artificial intelligence 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 startup has raised $21 million to expand in that direction. The Series A was co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, with existing investors Together Fund and Array VC also participating. The all-equity, primary funding valued Runable at $65 million after investment, co-founder and CEO Umesh Kumar (pictured above, right) said in an exclusive interview. Founded in 2025, Runable is targeting small businesses in an increasingly crowded market that includes AI giants such as Anthropic and OpenAI and coding platforms including Cursor, Lovable, and Replit. But the Bengaluru-based startup with its 15-person team 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. "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." Kumar and co-founder Saksham Sarda (pictured above, left) founded Runable initially as an AI infrastructure startup, building browser technology to scrape data at scale. However, the duo noticed users increasingly asked its browser-based agent to create things like slide decks and websites. That led the startup to eventually 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 stated. Today, Runable's agent allows users to build websites, apps, presentations, and other content by using natural language prompts, while handling some of the underlying infrastructure, including deployment and analytics. The startup is now extending the agent into what it calls the "grow" side of the business, where it aims to run ad campaigns, manage social media, handle SEO, and optimize a business's presence in AI chatbot results, among other tasks. Kumar told TechCrunch that the aim is to ultimately 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, Kumar said, with the U.S., UK, 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. The challenge of going beyond building Kumar declined to disclose Runable's current revenue or number of paying customers. He said, nonetheless, that its users consumed more than 1 trillion tokens over the last 90 days, with about 60% to 70% of that usage coming from paying customers. That usage comes at a cost, as Kumar acknowledged that Runable currently has negative gross margins. This is partly because the startup subsidizes AI usage for its customers. The startup, Kumar said, is working with a mix of models, including developing its own, and expects falling inference costs to help 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. Runable's bigger challenge may be standing out as all top AI model companies it relies on are increasingly building agents of their own. Kumar, however, 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 of Runable, 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. Asked about the limitation, Runable said its ability to run ads without customers connecting their own advertising accounts is currently available for ads on ChatGPT. The startup said it has partnerships that enable such ads but declined to identify the partners, describing those relationships as a "soft wedge." Kumar mentioned that Runable is not trying to beat coding agents at their own game. For developers working with local files or primarily writing code, he said tools including OpenAI's Codex or Anthropic's Claude Code can be a better fit. Runable is, however, targeting nontechnical small business owners who may not want to configure the tools and services required to turn an AI-generated product into a functioning business. General-purpose agents such as Manus and Genspark are seen as Runable's closest competitors, Kumar said, as they target similar users and markets. Nevertheless, Runable aims to differentiate itself by helping businesses find customers using AI rather than focusing on building with AI alone.

Runable raises $21M to realize small businesses' growth vision using AI agents

Runable raises $21M to realize small businesses' growth vision using AI agents Runable Inc., a platform that uses artificial intelligence to help businesses build, run and grow, announced Wednesday that it raised $21 million in early-stage funding to scale its operations and reach more enterprise outfits. Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners co-led the Series A funding round, alongside continued support from existing investors Together Fund and Array VC. Founded in 2025, Runable uses AI agents to form what it calls a single platform to help build and grow business operations. Its platform shares context and memory across tasks, assists with shipping products, works across surfaces - including websites, mobile and internal apps - and builds pitch decks and marketing videos. Users can also use it to quickly spin up applications with auth and payments. Once live, it supports day-to-day operations and growth by running paid advertising campaigns across ChatGPT Ads, Meta, Google, LinkedIn and TikTok. It works with users to generate a schedule for social content, cold email contacts, direct messaging and voice calls. It also tracks competition and brand sentiment, with an eye for search engine optimization, the emerging field of answer engine optimization, and overall customer support. "Building software stopped being the hard part," said co-founder and Chief Executive Umesh Kumar. "Nobody starts a business because they want a landing page. They start it because they want customers and revenue. Software creation got automated. Everything after it didn't. That's what Runable is for." The company calls itself "the operating system for small business," and aligns itself not as yet another website/app builder but as something that can adapt and grow as business needs change and expand. Runable is betting that generative AI is at the center of the revolution for taking what small business executives know about their own industry and turning it into operational growth. In an era where AI is making starting a business as easy as writing a prompt, organizing that into a working framework where people, operations, customer outreach and marketing all live is the gap the company wants to close. From the outset, the company's platform offers something people already know: a chatbot-like interface similar to ChatGPT. A business executive describes what they need and Runable does the work. It builds landing pages, internal apps, mobile apps, pitch decks, market analysis, prospect lists and so on. Where Runable wants to make its bone is in growth. That's where the paid ads happen - no ad account needed - the platform grows plans, launches and manages ad campaigns with little to no prior knowledge required. It also grows and builds the company's brand across social media, including Instagram, LinkedIn, X and TikTok, by creating content, scheduling it and posting based on what the company's market slice is interested in. The company believes this is where AI can sit: a layer that reduces operational toil and combines automation with industry and marketing data to scale presence. Echo noted that most of its 1.5 million users are small business owners with only two people in the agency, consultancy or company. Its platform currently assists customers worldwide, including the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and Brazil. The company said it will use the new funding to expand its growth capabilities across more channels, with deeper measurement and campaign management that agents can automate on their own. Echo is also hiring within its engineering, machine learning, growth and support teams. "There are millions of small businesses outgunned by companies with bigger teams and bigger budgets. Not better ideas," Kumar added. "We think that's a tooling problem, and we think it's solvable."

Agentic AI startup Runable raises $21 million from Susquehanna, Nexus Venture Partners

Founded in 2025 by Umesh Kumar and Saksham Sarda, Runable allows users to build websites and applications with databases, payments, and other infrastructure, and then use the same platform to market and operate those businesses. Agentic startup Runable has raised $21 million in a round co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, as it looks to build an AI platform to help small businesses. The round also saw participation from existing investors Together Fund and Array VC.Founded in 2025 by Umesh Kumar and Saksham Sarda, Runable allows users to build websites and applications with databases, payments, and other infrastructure, and then use the same