Ema raises $77M as AI agents start eating into enterprise software spending

Ema, a startup whose teams of AI agents automate corporate processes in HR, IT and finance, has raised $77 million in a Series B round, as AI starts competing for money that businesses have traditionally spent on enterprise software and IT services.

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 the 2024 round; the round was all primary equity, with no debt or secondary transactions.

What the “AI employees” do

Founded in 2023 by former Google and Coinbase executive Surojit Chatterjee and ex-Okta executive Souvik Sen, Ema sells what it calls “AI employees” — systems that coordinate multiple AI agents to run multi-step business processes across a company’s existing applications, rather than one task at a time.

Chatterjee said Ema first “wraps” around an enterprise’s existing applications, after which customers can cut their dependence on some of those products and, in some cases, replace them. “Many of our customers are already on the way to replace [large SaaS applications] completely, removing dependency on them, because they are mostly becoming like a database,” he told TechCrunch.

Traction and revenue

The company reports more than 50 active enterprise deals, over 1 million active enterprise users and more than 5 million actions and queries. Its customers include NTT DATA, Hitachi, ADP, PwC, Google, KPMG, Wipro and Microsoft.

Revenue has grown 50-fold over the past two years, Ema says, while bookings — the total value of multiyear contracts, not annual recurring revenue — have passed $150 million. Net dollar retention is around 180%.

Competition with the AI labs

Anthropic has pushed Claude deeper into core company operations, and OpenAI has built teams of forward-deployed engineers who work alongside customers. Chatterjee does not see the frontier labs as direct competitors: Ema’s software draws on more than 150 models, frontier and open-source alike, while the startup focuses on domain knowledge, integrations and orchestration. “Progress in frontier models is actually very beneficial to us,” he said.

Ema also expects AI to absorb implementation, integration and consulting work that companies have paid IT services firms to perform. Most of the new capital will fund go-to-market operations, particularly sales and marketing.

The Mountain View-headquartered startup has nearly 200 employees and plans to expand from the US and Europe into Asia-Pacific, South America and parts of the Middle East over the next year.