Does anybody know of other evidence? If not, then it looks bogus, a case of "il faudrait l'inventer" which got traction by piggybacking on an old-fashioned fraud story.
To sum up: the substantiated claim is boring and the lurid claim is unsubstantiated. When have we ever seen that before? And why did I waste half an hour on this?
I couldn't find any reference on the BuilderAI website claiming they use GenAI to build software. So the second claim lacks evidence.
Update: They mention AI to assemble features, not to generate code. So it's impossible to know whether they were actually using ML (traditional AI) to resolve dependencies and pull packages from a repo.
Engineer.ai says its “human-assisted AI” allows anyone to create a mobile app by clicking through a menu on its website. Users can then choose existing apps similar to their idea, such as Uber’s or Facebook’s. Then Engineer.ai creates the app largely automatically, it says, making the process cheaper and quicker than conventional app development.
“We’ve built software and an AI called Natasha that allows anyone to build custom software like ordering pizza,” Engineer.ai founder Sachin Dev Duggal said in an onstage interview in India last year. Since much of the code underpinning popular apps is similar, the company’s “human-assisted AI” can help assemble new ones automatically, he said. Roughly 82% of an app the company had recently developed “was built autonomously, in the first hour” by Engineer.ai’s technology, Mr. Duggal said at the time.
Documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and several people familiar with the company’s operations, including current and former staff, suggest Engineer.ai doesn’t use AI to assemble code for apps as it claims. They indicated that the company relies on human engineers in India and elsewhere to do most of that work, and that its AI claims are inflated even in light of the fake-it-till-you-make-it mentality common among tech startups.
Note the article is from 2019. "Engineer.ai" is the same company as "Builder.ai".
To summarise, my reading of the article is that the founder of Bulder.ai (at the time "Engineer.ai") promoted the company's technology as mostly AI, assisted by a few humans; and that WSJ saw documents suggesting otherwise.
dang, why do you say the claim is "lurid"? Is it because of the racist undertones of "Indians not AI"? That's fair, there's severe racism against Indian coders in the West, but scams and fraud absolutely happen and it is inevitable to be disgusted when they are revealed. There has to be a more balance stance than dismissing all fraud claims as "lurid".
I am a former employee from a few years ago. I didn't stay very long at all though.
In 2019 its former Chief Business Officer sued them for fraud, claiming that apps were built by Indian developers despite the claim that it was "80%" done by AI. There were detailed articles in the Wall Street Journal and The Verge at the time. I've found one reference saying it was settled out of court (the Telegraph), though I thought I'd previously read the case was dismissed.
When I was there 3 years later:
- the company had been renamed from Engineer.ai to Builder.ai
- the marketing materials still heavily pushed the claim that apps were 80% built by AI, curiously the exact same figure as it had been 3 years earlier
- there was a bunch of automation around small parts of the software development process. When customers went to create a new project there was an AI chatbot assistant (Natasha), which amongst other things asked the customer for their requirements, and created some estimates for how long things would take. There was also some automation for turning UI mockups into CSS styles and then merging the styles with templated React components. These various small bits of automation did have teams of real engineers working on it in the UK and the US. However, by and large it didn't really work. It seemed to me that the Indian outsourced programmers working on client projects totally ignored this technology anyway, and just went about their jobs as though it didn't exist. Despite being employed to work on this tech, I never had any interaction with the Indian developers building real client projects.
- a new team was spun up to use Generative AI to create frontend mock ups of an application from template components. This was integrated into the flow when potential clients were chatting with the Natasha AI chatbot. Some people worked genuinely hard on this project, and to some extent it did function. However, it didn't do much beyond the many other "create a frontend mockup from a single prompt" projects out there, other than having access to the company's internal React component templates. As far as I'm aware these frontend mockups were never used by the Indian developers who built the final projects.
In the tech world there is a very wide blurred zone between "outright fraud, which leads to a conviction in court" and "exagerrated claims". Given the extent to which Builder.ai committed literal fraud with their revenue figures and accounting, and given the hundreds of millions of dollars they raised on very limited real sales, I believe their claims about AI could plausibly also be literal fraud. However, the standards of a court case are much higher than my personal use of the word "fraud". I'm tempted to believe Musk is also bordering on fraud with e.g. the Boring Company, or his repeated claims about how close Tesla is to fully automated self-driving robo taxis. But given Tesla is building a genuine product with genuinely high sales and revenue, and given how much other crazy stuff Musk does that makes these exagerrated claims pale in comparison, it's not something that's ever going to lead to a court case.
Speculating, don’t they offer dev services that’s supposed to be done by AI? If the dev services were offered by devs, then that would be the scam. Now that I’ve said the second part, it does seem lurid because who the hell is paying for AI first code deliverables.
—-
Message to HN:
Instead of founding yet another startup, please build the next Tech Vice News and fucking goto the far corners of the tech world like Shane Smith did with North Korea with a camera. I promise to be a founding subscriber at whatever price you got.
Things you’ll need:
1) Credentialed Ivy League grad. Make sure they are sporadic like that WeWork asshole.
2) Ex VC who exudes wealth with every footstep he/she takes
3) The camera
4) And as HBO Silicon Valley suggests, the exact same combination of white guy, Indian guy, Chinese guy to flesh out the rest of the team.
See, I need to know what’s it like working for a scrum master in Tencent for example during crunch time. Also, whatever the fuck goes on inside a DeFi company in executive meetings. And of course, find the next Builder.ai, or at least the Microsoft funding round discussions. We’ve yet to even get a camera inside those Arab money meetings where Sam Altman begs for a trillion dollars. We shouldn’t live without such journalism.
> Less than two months ago, Builder.ai admitted to revising down core sales numbers and engaging auditors to inspect its financials for the past two years. This came amidst concerns from former employees who suggested sales performance had been inflated during prior investor briefings.
I was hoping for something interesting, but it is just plain old fashioned accounting fraud.
This is fake news. Builder.ai, like any other dev shop, had clients and was building apps using developers in India, pretty much like Infosys or any other Indian dev shop. Nothing wrong with that.
From what I read online, the real issue was "Natasha", their virtual assistant powered by a dedicated foundation model. They ran out of money before it got anywhere.
news to me buddy. this is perhaps a useless comment but then i think, articles resurface every now and again and it's intentional and welcome for those that missed. and this isn't exactly that of course, rather makes me think it's worth a comment: news is relative. discussion ensues, it's all good
This is so weird, its not that hard to actually build an app builder. There are multiple open-source repos (bolt etc), they could have just paid their "AI engineer" to actually build an AI engineer.
Shameless plug, but we built (https://v1.slashml.com), in roughly 2 weeks. Granted its not as mature, but we don't have billions :)
It's plausible they started with a typical software consultancy and its crappy in house app builder scripts, and reformed it as an AI thing in order to inflate its value?
Elon Musk spent $6 billion training his model. Sam Altman spent $40 billion. Where did Builder AI's $500 million go? Probably into building a foundation model, not even a full LLM.
In this whole AI revolution we sometimes forget the power of cheap human labour... and if I recall correctly, that's not the first time such a thing happens. Amazon made a "no-checkout AI automated store" which was a bunch of cameras connected to a bunch of Indians. At this point, I think we should consider "Indians" a valid element of any engineering architecture, because they perfectly fill the niche where you have work that is almost easy to automate, but not quite.
Of course, "Indian-as-a-Service" doesn't sound as cool as AI, but besides this, I think it's a valid solution and a business model for many use cases.
If you have an idea for a cool AI startup it's faster to build your first prototype without the actual AI, just faking that part. But if your Actual Indians had 95% accuracy and you can't get an AI to do more than 85% then you are kind of stuck if you raised money and got customers pretending that your Actual Indians are Artificial Intelligence.
Also it can't have been fast. Didn't customers and investors feel that it was weird that CoPilot spits out code as fast as you can type, but Builder.ai needs days or weeks to generate your app. Or where these Indian developers just really really fast?
Available sure, but cost effective? My guess is that they tried a lot of things to get ChatGPT to work and burnt out of money before it got cheap enough to fit with a reliable business model. Early but not wrong, I guess.
I did due-diligence on Builder.AI for a venture firm I was interning at (circa 2019). It was extremely apparent (Glassdoor, talking to any employee) it was complete BS.
When I say apparent, it took less than 15 minutes and a couple of google searches to get a sniff of it.
Nobody has mentioned that they were reselling the AWS credits they had. We had them as our billing partner with very good discounts.
The day it happened, AWS sent us a mail to remove them as our billing partner.
I've read indications that this was always aimed at hybrid model rather than pure AI, but hard to tell now because all the news is on this indians train.
Another AI scam. Wasn’t there a similar case with the Amazon stores? Just walk out I think. Could be understood as sound advice if someone pitches you something groundbreaking done by AI.
[+] [-] dang|9 months ago|reply
The boring claim is that the company inflated its sales through a round-tripping scheme: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-30/builder-a... (https://archive.ph/1oyOw). That's consistent with other recent reporting (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44080640)
The lurid claim is that the company's AI product was actually "Indians pretending to be bots". From skimming the OP and https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/how..., the only citation seems to be this self-promotional LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7334521... (https://web.archive.org/web/20250602211336/https://www.linke...).
Does anybody know of other evidence? If not, then it looks bogus, a case of "il faudrait l'inventer" which got traction by piggybacking on an old-fashioned fraud story.
To sum up: the substantiated claim is boring and the lurid claim is unsubstantiated. When have we ever seen that before? And why did I waste half an hour on this?
(Thanks to rafram and sva_ for the links in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44172409 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44175373.)
[+] [-] davidgerard|9 months ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D36ZmJRYGK8
Engineers in the dev office say that's false and "Natasha" was a running joke in the office:
https://techfundingnews.com/fake-it-till-you-unicorn-builder...
[+] [-] kamikazechaser|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pyman|9 months ago|reply
Update: They mention AI to assemble features, not to generate code. So it's impossible to know whether they were actually using ML (traditional AI) to resolve dependencies and pull packages from a repo.
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|9 months ago|reply
Engineer.ai says its “human-assisted AI” allows anyone to create a mobile app by clicking through a menu on its website. Users can then choose existing apps similar to their idea, such as Uber’s or Facebook’s. Then Engineer.ai creates the app largely automatically, it says, making the process cheaper and quicker than conventional app development.
“We’ve built software and an AI called Natasha that allows anyone to build custom software like ordering pizza,” Engineer.ai founder Sachin Dev Duggal said in an onstage interview in India last year. Since much of the code underpinning popular apps is similar, the company’s “human-assisted AI” can help assemble new ones automatically, he said. Roughly 82% of an app the company had recently developed “was built autonomously, in the first hour” by Engineer.ai’s technology, Mr. Duggal said at the time.
Documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and several people familiar with the company’s operations, including current and former staff, suggest Engineer.ai doesn’t use AI to assemble code for apps as it claims. They indicated that the company relies on human engineers in India and elsewhere to do most of that work, and that its AI claims are inflated even in light of the fake-it-till-you-make-it mentality common among tech startups.
Original link (by nikcub):
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-startup-boom-raises-question...
Arxiv:
https://archive.ph/R3nMZ
Note the article is from 2019. "Engineer.ai" is the same company as "Builder.ai".
To summarise, my reading of the article is that the founder of Bulder.ai (at the time "Engineer.ai") promoted the company's technology as mostly AI, assisted by a few humans; and that WSJ saw documents suggesting otherwise.
dang, why do you say the claim is "lurid"? Is it because of the racist undertones of "Indians not AI"? That's fair, there's severe racism against Indian coders in the West, but scams and fraud absolutely happen and it is inevitable to be disgusted when they are revealed. There has to be a more balance stance than dismissing all fraud claims as "lurid".
[+] [-] redeyedtreefrog|9 months ago|reply
In 2019 its former Chief Business Officer sued them for fraud, claiming that apps were built by Indian developers despite the claim that it was "80%" done by AI. There were detailed articles in the Wall Street Journal and The Verge at the time. I've found one reference saying it was settled out of court (the Telegraph), though I thought I'd previously read the case was dismissed.
When I was there 3 years later:
- the company had been renamed from Engineer.ai to Builder.ai
- the marketing materials still heavily pushed the claim that apps were 80% built by AI, curiously the exact same figure as it had been 3 years earlier
- there was a bunch of automation around small parts of the software development process. When customers went to create a new project there was an AI chatbot assistant (Natasha), which amongst other things asked the customer for their requirements, and created some estimates for how long things would take. There was also some automation for turning UI mockups into CSS styles and then merging the styles with templated React components. These various small bits of automation did have teams of real engineers working on it in the UK and the US. However, by and large it didn't really work. It seemed to me that the Indian outsourced programmers working on client projects totally ignored this technology anyway, and just went about their jobs as though it didn't exist. Despite being employed to work on this tech, I never had any interaction with the Indian developers building real client projects.
- a new team was spun up to use Generative AI to create frontend mock ups of an application from template components. This was integrated into the flow when potential clients were chatting with the Natasha AI chatbot. Some people worked genuinely hard on this project, and to some extent it did function. However, it didn't do much beyond the many other "create a frontend mockup from a single prompt" projects out there, other than having access to the company's internal React component templates. As far as I'm aware these frontend mockups were never used by the Indian developers who built the final projects.
In the tech world there is a very wide blurred zone between "outright fraud, which leads to a conviction in court" and "exagerrated claims". Given the extent to which Builder.ai committed literal fraud with their revenue figures and accounting, and given the hundreds of millions of dollars they raised on very limited real sales, I believe their claims about AI could plausibly also be literal fraud. However, the standards of a court case are much higher than my personal use of the word "fraud". I'm tempted to believe Musk is also bordering on fraud with e.g. the Boring Company, or his repeated claims about how close Tesla is to fully automated self-driving robo taxis. But given Tesla is building a genuine product with genuinely high sales and revenue, and given how much other crazy stuff Musk does that makes these exagerrated claims pale in comparison, it's not something that's ever going to lead to a court case.
[+] [-] ivape|9 months ago|reply
—-
Message to HN:
Instead of founding yet another startup, please build the next Tech Vice News and fucking goto the far corners of the tech world like Shane Smith did with North Korea with a camera. I promise to be a founding subscriber at whatever price you got.
Things you’ll need:
1) Credentialed Ivy League grad. Make sure they are sporadic like that WeWork asshole.
2) Ex VC who exudes wealth with every footstep he/she takes
3) The camera
4) And as HBO Silicon Valley suggests, the exact same combination of white guy, Indian guy, Chinese guy to flesh out the rest of the team.
See, I need to know what’s it like working for a scrum master in Tencent for example during crunch time. Also, whatever the fuck goes on inside a DeFi company in executive meetings. And of course, find the next Builder.ai, or at least the Microsoft funding round discussions. We’ve yet to even get a camera inside those Arab money meetings where Sam Altman begs for a trillion dollars. We shouldn’t live without such journalism.
[+] [-] paxys|9 months ago|reply
I was hoping for something interesting, but it is just plain old fashioned accounting fraud.
[+] [-] rafram|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pyman|9 months ago|reply
From what I read online, the real issue was "Natasha", their virtual assistant powered by a dedicated foundation model. They ran out of money before it got anywhere.
[+] [-] sva_|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bartread|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] apsurd|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] fazkan|9 months ago|reply
Shameless plug, but we built (https://v1.slashml.com), in roughly 2 weeks. Granted its not as mature, but we don't have billions :)
[+] [-] driverdan|9 months ago|reply
Besides simple one page self-contained apps, yes, it's quite hard. So hard that it's still an unsolved problem.
[+] [-] glutamate|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] xkcd-sucks|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hnuser123456|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ricardobeat|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rokob|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] CSMastermind|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|9 months ago|reply
OpenAI is on track to spend $14 billion this year.
[+] [-] monksy|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] more_corn|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] TrackerFF|9 months ago|reply
Wouldn't surprise me if the developers were hired from sweatshop staffing agencies, or just working directly for minimum wage - if that even.
[+] [-] pyman|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] 77pt77|9 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] anal_reactor|9 months ago|reply
Of course, "Indian-as-a-Service" doesn't sound as cool as AI, but besides this, I think it's a valid solution and a business model for many use cases.
[+] [-] axus|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gamblor956|9 months ago|reply
We never thought that it wasn't just a joke...
[+] [-] ceejayoz|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Ancalagon|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wongarsu|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mrweasel|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperadvanced|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] immibis|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|9 months ago|reply
Microsoft-backed UK tech unicorn Builder.ai collapses into insolvency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44080640 - May 2025 (136 comments)
[+] [-] moonikakiss|9 months ago|reply
When I say apparent, it took less than 15 minutes and a couple of google searches to get a sniff of it.
Somehow, you can still raise $500MM ++.
I think about that a lot
[+] [-] perryh2|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] a_void_sky|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Havoc|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] belter|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] joshuahedlund|9 months ago|reply
Thanks for the search though:
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30397201
This one from 3 yrs ago had some interesting comments
> off topic, but they have a very suspect pricing page: https://www.builder.ai/studio-store
> "Delivery: 12 weeks"
> is Builder.ai just a CRUD app for indian sweatshops to build the apps?
> > It would not have spawned an entire industry and no code websites every other week or so if it was ‘just a CRUD app’.
[+] [-] LeicaLatte|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cubano|9 months ago|reply
Shameful.
[+] [-] tartoran|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ManBeardPc|9 months ago|reply