Builder.ai

The Promise

Builder.ai emerged in 2016 with an audacious pitch: build software as easily as ordering pizza. Founded by Sachin Dev Duggal in London, the company claimed to have cracked the code on democratizing app development. Their platform would let anyone—from small business owners to enterprise clients—specify what they wanted and have AI assemble it from pre-built components.

The vision was intoxicating. No more expensive development teams. No more months-long timelines. Just describe your app, and Builder.ai’s artificial intelligence would piece it together like digital Lego blocks. Duggal was a charismatic salesman who positioned the company as the great equalizer—technology that would let the little guy compete with tech giants.

The target market was vast: every business that had ever been priced out of custom software development. Builder.ai promised to collapse timelines from months to weeks, and costs from hundreds of thousands to mere thousands of dollars.

The Rise

Builder.ai’s trajectory looked like a Silicon Valley dream. The company raised $29.5 million in late 2018 in what was then reported as one of Europe’s largest Series A investments. The checks kept coming: a $100 million Series C, then a staggering $250 million Series D in May 2023 that pushed the valuation to $1.5 billion.

The investor list read like a who’s-who of tech royalty. Microsoft backed them. SoftBank’s SBLA Advisers participated. The company was featured in Forbes, TechCrunch, and business publications worldwide. Duggal was lauded as a visionary, appearing on stages and podcasts to evangelize the AI-powered future of software development.

By 2023, Builder.ai claimed to have served thousands of customers and built apps across dozens of industries. Revenue figures were impressive on paper. The unicorn status seemed well-earned.

The Fall

The cracks began showing in 2024 when former employees started talking to journalists. What they revealed was stunning: Builder.ai’s vaunted artificial intelligence was largely artificial—but not intelligent. Behind the sleek interface sat approximately 700 engineers in India, manually coding the apps that customers believed were being assembled by AI.

The company had essentially built an elaborate Mechanical Turk operation dressed up in AI marketing language. Customers paying for AI-generated apps were actually paying for human developers working around the clock in Indian offices, their labor obscured by a technological facade.

The financial house of cards collapsed quickly. Despite raising $445 million, the company had burned through its capital at an unsustainable rate. The unit economics never worked—paying hundreds of human developers while pricing services as if they were automated was a recipe for hemorrhaging cash.

By early 2025, Builder.ai filed for bankruptcy. Duggal faced questions about misrepresentation to investors. The Microsoft backing that had once seemed like validation now looked like due diligence failure. Several executives faced criminal probes relating to the alleged fraud.

The company that promised to democratize software development had instead demonstrated how easily sophisticated investors could be fooled by AI hype and a compelling narrative.

Warning Signs

• Pricing too good to be true: Building custom apps for a fraction of traditional costs should have prompted questions about how the economics worked
• Black-box AI claims: The company was vague about how its AI actually functioned, deflecting technical questions with marketing speak
• Rapid scaling without proportional efficiency gains: Growing engineering headcount in India didn’t match the narrative of automated AI systems
• Founder’s previous ventures: Duggal had a complicated history with earlier companies that warranted closer scrutiny
• Customer complaints about timelines: Despite AI promises, delivery times were inconsistent—more consistent with human bottlenecks than automated systems

Epitaph

🪦 Built on lies, not code