How this billion-dollar London startup backed by Microsoft made 700 engineers sitting in India pose as AI |
[ad_1] London-based Builder.ai, once valued at $1.5 billion and backed by Microsoft and Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, has filed for bankruptcy after reports that its "AI-powered" app development platform was actually operated by Indian engineers, said to be around 700 of them, pretending to be artificial intelligence.The startup, which raised over $445 million from investors including Microsoft and the Qatar Investment Authority, promised to make software development "as easy as ordering pizza" through its AI assistant "Natasha." However, as per the reports, the company's technology was largely smoke and mirrors, human developers in India manually wrote code based on customer requests while the company marketed their work as AI-generated output.Builder.ai's dramatic collapse came in May 2025 when lender Viola Credit seized $37 million from the company's accounts after discovering the startup had inflated its 2024 revenue projections by 300%. Founder […]