Math is a flexible concept in Bengaluru these days.

Emergent, a startup that didn’t exist when you bought your last pair of sneakers, claims it has cleared $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Eight months. That is the entire timeline. Most founders are still arguing over the hex codes for their logo at eight months. Emergent is apparently printing money faster than a central bank in a hyperinflationary spiral.

They call it "vibe-coding."

If that sounds like something a marketing intern dreamt up after three shots of espresso and a fever dream, that’s because it is. The pitch is simple: you don’t write code. You don’t even really prompt it in the way we’ve spent the last year learning to do. You just describe a "feeling" or a "user journey" or a "vibe," and the engine spits out a functional application. It is software development for people who find the act of thinking in logic gates too strenuous.

But the $100 million figure? That’s where the friction starts.

Silicon Valley history is littered with companies that mistook a massive venture capital injection for actual market traction. Emergent is different, or so they say. They claim their revenue isn't just "committed spend" from bored VCs, but hard contracts from legacy firms desperate to look modern. I’ve seen the whispers. A significant chunk of that $100 million reportedly comes from a single $18 million "framework agreement" with a global logistics giant that hasn't actually deployed a single line of Emergent’s code yet. It’s a "pilot" dressed up in a tuxedo.

There’s also the price tag. Emergent is asking for $12,000 per seat, per year. For context, that’s more than a Bloomberg Terminal. They’re charging premium prices for what is essentially a high-end wrapper around someone else’s LLM.

The trade-off is obvious, though nobody in the boardroom wants to say it out loud. When you build an enterprise stack on "vibes," you get vibe-based security. You get vibe-based scalability. One senior engineer at a firm currently trialing the software told me the output is "a house of cards held together by spit and API calls." If the underlying model shifts its weights next Tuesday, the entire app architecture might decide it has a different vibe. You aren't building a product; you're renting a hallucination.

The founders don't care. They’re doing the victory lap. They talk about "democratizing creation." They don't use the word "landscape"—even they know that’s a red flag for a bubble—but they talk about "velocity" until your ears bleed. They’ve managed to turn the boring, artisanal process of software engineering into a fast-food experience. It’s quick, it’s salty, and it makes you feel slightly ill an hour later.

The VCs are biting because they’re terrified. After the crypto winter and the death of the metaverse, they need a win that looks like a rocket ship. They’ll swallow any number if it’s big enough and comes with a slick dashboard. They don't want to hear about technical debt or the fact that "vibe-coding" is just a fancy way of saying "we’ve automated the mistakes."

In the old world, you built a tool, you found a market, and you scaled. In the new world, you just need a compelling enough fiction to trigger a FOMO-driven procurement cycle. The reality of the $100 million doesn't matter as much as the momentum it creates. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy where the revenue is real until the first time the system has to handle a real-world edge case that wasn't in the demo.

We’ve seen this movie before. The setting has shifted to a glass tower in Karnataka, and the actors are younger, but the script hasn't changed. You can't sustain a billion-dollar valuation on a mood board. Eventually, the sun comes up, the coffee wears off, and someone asks to see the actual math.

I’m sure the exit will be spectacular. I just hope the people buying the software realize that "vibes" are notoriously difficult to maintain during a quarterly audit.