An AI Startup Called Runable Just Raised $21 Million — Here's What It Does
Indian startup Runable has raised $21 million from investors, valuing the company at $65 million. The funding round was co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, with existing backers Together Fund and Array VC also participating. Co-founder and CEO Umesh Kumar shared the details in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch.
Runable is based in Bengaluru, India, and was founded in 2025 by Kumar and Saksham Sarda. The company started out building tools for collecting large amounts of data from websites, then shifted to become an AI agent. An AI agent is software that can carry out multi-step tasks for you when you describe what you want in plain language, rather than just answering a single question. The company has 15 employees and about 1.7 million registered users, mostly in the U.S., U.K., and Japan, with some in Brazil.
Runable's agent lets people create websites, apps, presentations, and other content just by describing what they want in everyday language. The new funding is meant to expand what the agent can do, so it can also help users find customers, run ad campaigns, and promote their businesses across search engines, social media, and AI chatbots. The idea is that if an AI agent helps you build something online, it can also help you get people to use it.
The growth numbers are notable. Within three weeks of turning on payments in March, Runable was on pace to make $2 million a year. Over the last 90 days, users processed more than 1 trillion tokens through the service. Tokens are the small pieces of text that AI models read and generate, and they serve as a measure of how much the system is being used. About 60% to 70% of that usage came from paying customers.
The financial picture is more complicated. Runable currently loses money on each transaction because it pays some of the computing costs for its users. Running an AI model to produce responses requires significant computing power, and that computing power is expensive. The company is betting that as it grows, it can either lower those costs or move enough users to higher-priced plans that cover the actual expense. The $21 million gives Runable time to figure that out.
The competitive landscape adds another layer. On August 24, Runable published a blog post titled "Manus Deleted User Data This Weekend: How to Migrate Your Projects to Runable," positioning itself as a safe alternative for users of a competing AI agent platform called Manus. The post refers to an incident where Manus deleted user data and offers step-by-step instructions for switching over. It is a move that frames Runable's reliability as a selling point in a market where users are still figuring out which companies they can trust with their data.
The broader context here is a category still finding its footing. AI agents that build software from plain-language descriptions attracted enormous attention through 2025, but none of the companies in this space have settled on a business model that reliably makes money. Several well-funded startups have struggled to turn rapid user growth into sustainable profits, and data incidents at competitors create opportunities for others to win over their users. Runable's mix of fast revenue growth, a large user base, and losses on every transaction fits a familiar pattern: a company betting that getting big enough fast enough will solve its cost problems before the money runs out.
In this author's view, the valuation deserves a closer look. A $65 million valuation on $2 million in annual revenue means investors are paying more than 30 times the company's yearly revenue, which reflects very high expectations for future growth even compared to other AI startups. The funding structure also tells us something: none of the existing shareholders sold any of their stakes, which suggests the founders believe the company will be worth far more in future funding rounds.
For a company founded less than two years ago with a team of 15, the numbers show that people genuinely want the product. The question Runable now faces is one that has come up in every major technology shift I have watched over three decades: can the company get large fast enough to cover its costs before the money runs out. The AI agent layer has made it cheaper than ever for people to start using a service. Whether it has made delivering that service cheap enough to sustain a business is the part that is still unanswered.
The $21 million buys time to find out.
