Emergent wants to sell you an AI agent. The problem is that a wildly popular open-source project called OpenClaw already does most of the same things and costs nothing beyond your API bill.
The Bengaluru-founded, San Francisco-headquartered startup on April 15, launched Wingman, an autonomous AI agent that runs in the background handling emails, scheduling, customer support, research tasks, and CRM updates across Gmail, Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, and iMessage. No terminal. No configuration files. No command line. You sign in, connect your tools, and the agent starts working.
Emergent hit $100 million in annual run-rate revenue eight months after launch, doubling from $50 million in a single month, with more than six million users across 190 countries. The startup has raised $100 million total, including a $70 million Series B in January led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Khosla Ventures, which tripled its valuation to $300 million. Lightspeed, Prosus, Y Combinator, and Google's AI Futures Fund are also in.
Ogbonda Chivumnovu
What OpenClaw showed, and what Emergent spotted
OpenClaw requires users to install it on a server or local device and connect it to a large language model, a process that might be difficult for less tech-savvy users. One of the project's own maintainers warned publicly that if you cannot understand how to run a command line, the project is far too dangerous to use safely. The project now sits at 358,000 GitHub stars and 72,900 forks, numbers that reflect deep developer enthusiasm but say little about mainstream adoption.
Wingman skips the setup entirely. It connects to Gmail, Outlook, Google Calendar, Slack, GitHub, WhatsApp, Telegram, and iMessage through a simple sign-in, with no developer setup, no complex permissions, and no onboarding overhead. Users choose which model powers the agent, with options including Claude, ChatGPT, or Emergent's own. For consequential actions like sending emails or making purchases on someone's behalf, Wingman asks for approval first, a feature the company calls trust boundaries.
OpenClaw's creator, Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, joined OpenAI in February and handed stewardship of the project to a non-profit foundation.
The co-founder and CEO of Emergent, Mukund Jha, told TechCrunch the agent still has limits, saying it struggles around consistency in really ambiguous situations, messy edge cases, unclear goals, or workflows where a lot of human judgment is needed.
Wingman launches with a limited free trial before moving to paid tiers at $20 or $200 per month. Existing Emergent users get access through their current accounts.
Damilare Odedina
