What if the strategic brainpower of McKinsey could fit inside a monthly subscription cheaper than your office rent? That's exactly what one ambitious startup from an unlikely city in India is promising.
Rocket, a startup headquartered not in Bangalore or Mumbai but in the diamond-polishing hub of Surat, has just launched Rocket 1.0 a platform that uses artificial intelligence to produce consulting-grade product strategy reports from simple text prompts. The platform connects research, product building, and competitive intelligence in a single workflow, generating detailed documents that include pricing strategies, unit economics, and go-to-market recommendations.
The timing is no accident. The world of software building has been transformed by AI coding tools like Cursor, Replit, and Lovable, which allow almost anyone to generate working code in minutes. But Rocket's founder believes everyone is asking the wrong question.
"Everyone can generate the code now… it has become a commodity. But what to build is something which everyone is missing," said co-founder and CEO Vishal Virani. His argument is simple but powerful: building software has never been easier, yet most products still fail not because the code was bad, but because the strategy behind it was flawed or nonexistent.
So What Does Rocket Actually Deliver?
The platform produces product requirement documents in PDF format that resemble consulting-style reports rather than the feature-focused outputs of typical AI coding tools. Think less chatbot, more boardroom-ready strategy deck.
It can also track competitors, monitoring changes to their websites and traffic trends. Rocket pulls data from over 1,000 sources, including Meta's ad libraries, Similarweb's API, and its own crawlers.
At the top tier, the $250 monthly plan can generate two to three "McKinsey-grade" research reports alongside product builds. The full platform, including competitive intelligence, costs $350 per month a figure that would barely cover one hour of a senior consultant's time at a traditional firm.
But Here's the Catch
No product this ambitious comes without caveats. TechCrunch tested the platform before launch and found that some analysis appeared to be synthesized from existing data combining known pricing models, user behavior patterns, and competitive insights rather than independently verifiable information.
In other words, the AI is very good at assembling what is already known into professional-looking documents. Whether it can deliver the kind of original, industry-specific insight that makes consulting truly valuable remains an open question. Virani acknowledged this and said human support is available when users need it.
The Numbers Behind the Hype
Rocket's growth story is hard to ignore. The company raised a $15 million seed round in September from Accel, Salesforce Ventures, and Together Fund. Since then, its user base has exploded from 400,000 to over 1.5 million across 180 countries.
The startup reports an annualized average revenue per user of roughly $4,000 and gross margins exceeding 50 percent, though it did not disclose how many users are actually paying customers. That missing detail matters a million free users and a few thousand paying ones would tell a very different story than the headline numbers suggest.
Between 20 and 30 percent of Rocket's customers are small and medium-sized businesses precisely the segment that needs strategic guidance but cannot afford traditional consulting.
The company runs with a lean team of 57 employees split between Surat and Palo Alto.
The Bottom Line
Rocket is making a bold bet: that in a world where code writes itself, the real value lies in knowing what to build and why. If it can consistently deliver on the promise of affordable, actionable strategy, it could democratize a service that has historically been reserved for corporations with deep pockets.
But founders tempted by the idea of AI-generated McKinsey reports should keep one thing in mind even the best AI output is a starting point, not a final answer. The companies that succeed will be the ones that use tools like Rocket to think faster, not to stop thinking altogether.
