Today, I want to talk about this person, the founder and former CEO of the AI programming company Builder.ai - Sachin Dev Duggal.
He not only created a fake AI company that is "entirely human, with no intelligence."
Secured hundreds of millions in funding from giants like SoftBank and Microsoft, with a valuation reaching 1.5 billion.
And dare to falsely report 300% revenue to investors.
Yes, there is no AI in the backend of this company, only a group of Indian guys pretending to write code as AI.
What's even more shocking is that this scam has persisted for 8 years.
But this week he is completely done for.
Founder and former CEO Sachin Dev Duggal
Following the recent exposure of the "fraud," the previous round of investors rushed to freeze the remaining $37 million in their investment accounts (having invested a total of $50 million), leaving only $5 million in the company's account. However, this $5 million is also restricted by the government's regulations on capital outflow, making it impossible to use for payroll.
There is no choice, Builder.ai can only file for bankruptcy, and at this time the CEO has already changed to Manpreet Ratia, who is there to "clean up the mess"—founder Sachin Dev Duggal resigned from the CEO position in February, and Ratia took over.
This farce directly led to the largest bankruptcy event among AI startups since the release of ChatGPT in 2022—this company was valued at over $1.5 billion in its last funding round.
Bankruptcy liquidation announcement of Builder.ai
The official website of Builder.ai is no longer accessible, and only two contact email addresses remain.
In this turmoil, the "big loser" besides Viola Credit, which provided $50 million, is also one of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds, the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), which led a $250 million financing two years ago.
And in the same year, they also invested and became strategic partners with Microsoft. In fact, they even integrated Builder.ai into their cloud services.
Golden Age
Builder.ai was born in London, stemming from its founder Sachin Dev Duggal's dissatisfaction with traditional software development.
In the AI-driven narrative golden age, Builder.ai has a catchy slogan that cannot be ignored: "Making software development as easy as ordering a pizza."
This startup, founded in 2016, claims it can democratize software development by allowing non-engineers to build complex applications through a platform that is purportedly driven by AI.
The promotional slogan of AI is exceptionally effective for investors.
Builder.ai was formerly known as Engineer.ai, a company headquartered in London and Los Angeles that raised $29.5 million in funding from investors including Deepcore Inc. in 2018, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of SoftBank.
Other investors include the Zurich-based venture capital firm Lakestar (an early investor in Facebook Inc. and Airbnb Inc.) and Singapore-based Jungle Ventures.
Founder Sachin Dev Duggal at an early technology conference
By 2022, Builder.ai had raised $195 million and in May 2023, added another $250 million in a funding round led by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA).
In the same year, Microsoft joined as a strategic investor and partner, integrating its Builder.ai platform into its cloud service products.
This has brought immense recognition, and the expectations that follow are equally great.
In the following 8 years, it raised over $445 million in funding, with investors including Microsoft and the Qatar Investment Authority, and the company's valuation also crossed the $1.3 billion mark.
The solution provided by Builder.ai is to combine modular code components with human developers, coordinated by AI.
The platform named "Builder Studio" is equipped with a digital assistant called "Natasha" that promises an AI-driven seamless user experience.
Builder.ai's cool official website is currently completely inaccessible.
But behind this vision is the fact that most of the work is done by developers in India, rather than AI.
In 2019, The Wall Street Journal revealed an embarrassing truth: Builder.ai's AI is more of a marketing gimmick than an engineering breakthrough.
Multiple current and former employees have stated that some of the pricing and scheduling calculations are done by traditional software, and most of the remaining work is also completed manually by employees.
If you tell clients that you are using AI, they are likely not to think of the technology from the 1950s. Decision trees are a very old and simple technology.
These individuals stated that the company lacks natural language processing technology, and that the decision trees used internally should not be considered AI.
As reported, the AI company Builder.ai is "all manual, no intelligence."
The gap between this narrative and reality will determine the company's development trajectory.
There is only artificiality, no intelligence
Signs of deception by Builder.ai are not only found in the 2019 Wall Street Journal report.
According to revelations from several former employees and insiders on Reddit, Builder.ai may have initially had only human involvement, without any intelligence.
Multiple former employees stated that management could not possibly be unaware of the ongoing fraud, but simply turned a blind eye. During two years at this company, I hardly saw any projects being delivered.
Moreover, former employees revealed that Builder.ai drastically reduces employee salaries, even claiming that "the pay is too garbage," and that it is not an AI-oriented company, but rather a marketing-oriented one.
A year ago, a user discovered that he was "incomprehensible" to his Builder.ai services.
Including: extremely poor development experience, lack of modules, code is unusable, unable to access IDE and some code cannot be modified at all.
There are insiders who directly reveal that Builder.ai is actually a company that uses "ai domain names" to commit fraud. The company employs a large number of low-cost developers to "pretend to be AI."
Liquidation Moment
Over time, the rifts within Builder.ai have been widening.
According to insiders, the company has long relied on exaggerated revenue forecasts and AI-related hype to secure funding.
The large global workforce and the costly expansion plans, including the exploration of new markets in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, have led to a continuous rise in the rate of capital consumption.
Meanwhile, the former CEO's legal issues are also emerging one after another.
According to the "Financial Times," Duggal is involved in the investigation of a money laundering criminal case in India. In response, the General Counsel of Builder.ai stated in a now-deleted blog post that Duggal is merely a witness in the case.
However, Duggal resigned as CEO in February but remains on the board and retains his "wizard" title.
He was succeeded by Manpreet Ratia, a former executive at Amazon and Flipkart, who previously served as managing partner at Jungle Ventures, a Builder.ai investor.
Then, the moment of liquidation has arrived.
In May 2025, Viola Credit, one of the senior investors of Builder.ai, seized 37 million USD from the company's account, triggering a default.
Only $5 million in cash remains in the hands of CEO Manpreet Ratia, who took over to clean up the mess just two months ago.
A few days later, he filed for bankruptcy.
It has been proven that Builder.ai provided exaggerated financial forecasts to lenders and misrepresented its revenue health.
This breach of contract allows Viola Credit to take decisive action.
But the greater reason behind this structural collapse is that their business model has never matched their brand promotion.
Ratia admitted during a company-wide conference call that the defeat was inevitable. Most global employees were laid off, and products that were once positioned as flagship innovations in AI have been shelved.
On May 20th, it officially declared bankruptcy.
A month before the failure, the company underwent a last-minute reorganization, laying off 220 of its 770 employees.
Builder.ai stated this week that due to "inability to recover from historical challenges and past decisions, which have put immense pressure on the company's financial situation," the company will appoint an executive to oversee the bankruptcy process, despite management's "relentless efforts."
According to the Financial Times, Builder.ai owes Amazon a total of $85 million and owes Microsoft $30 million.
Entrepreneurial Star
Why was Duggal able to win the favor of investors at the beginning? Whether it was Qatari funds, SoftBank, or Microsoft, they are not easily fooled.
This brings us to mention Duggal's "glamorous" resume.
Sachin Dev Duggal started his career at the age of 14 by assembling PCs, and by the age of 17, he created one of the world's first automated currency arbitrage trading systems for Deutsche Bank.
At the age of 21, while studying at Imperial College, he launched his next entrepreneurial project - a cloud computing company called Nivio.
After leaving Nivio, which was valued at 100 million dollars, Duggal began focusing on creating a photo-sharing app called Shoto.
However, he found it difficult to find front-end developers that met his needs. Duggal couldn't help but wonder: if he himself was struggling to find reliable help, how could someone without an engineering background start building an application?
So, he founded Builder.ai with the aim of making software building "as simple as ordering a pizza."
The story that follows is already known to everyone.
AI whitewashing
In the industry, the model of Builder.ai, which wraps traditional tech services as AI to defraud funds, is referred to as "AI washing."
Its failure has also reignited discussions about the necessity of conducting technical due diligence in AI trading.
For clients, many of whom are startups and small to medium-sized enterprises, this sudden shutdown has left them scrambling to rebuild or migrate their applications. This highlights the risks of relying on emerging players to provide critical mission software infrastructure.
Despite the setback, the broader low-code/no-code market remains resilient.
Gartner predicts that by 2028, 60% of new enterprise applications will be developed using such platforms. It is expected that by the end of this year, the global market size will reach $26 billion.
From Gartner's accolades to Fast Company's rankings, from Popular Investors to the top company logos displayed on their websites, Builder.ai seems to be one of the great success stories of the AI era.
But like many companies built on hype, it confuses scale with sustainability, and notoriety with viability.
Ultimately, the story of Builder.ai is less about a failed technology and more about the consequences of pretending it once worked.
In the investment frenzy driven by ChatGPT, scale, valuation, and exposure do not equal a moat.
The story of Builder.ai is strikingly similar to that of the former Theranos—when there is a one millimeter gap between technological promises and actual capabilities, the capital market will tear open a chasm of one kilometer in the next second.
Reference:
View Original
The content is for reference only, not a solicitation or offer. No investment, tax, or legal advice provided. See Disclaimer for more risks disclosure.
$1.5 billion AI unicorn collapses, all due to Indian programmers impersonating! Microsoft and Amazon are badly fooled.
The Indian brother is really a bit fierce!
Today, I want to talk about this person, the founder and former CEO of the AI programming company Builder.ai - Sachin Dev Duggal.
He not only created a fake AI company that is "entirely human, with no intelligence."
Secured hundreds of millions in funding from giants like SoftBank and Microsoft, with a valuation reaching 1.5 billion.
And dare to falsely report 300% revenue to investors.
Yes, there is no AI in the backend of this company, only a group of Indian guys pretending to write code as AI.
What's even more shocking is that this scam has persisted for 8 years.
But this week he is completely done for.
Founder and former CEO Sachin Dev Duggal
Following the recent exposure of the "fraud," the previous round of investors rushed to freeze the remaining $37 million in their investment accounts (having invested a total of $50 million), leaving only $5 million in the company's account. However, this $5 million is also restricted by the government's regulations on capital outflow, making it impossible to use for payroll.
There is no choice, Builder.ai can only file for bankruptcy, and at this time the CEO has already changed to Manpreet Ratia, who is there to "clean up the mess"—founder Sachin Dev Duggal resigned from the CEO position in February, and Ratia took over.
This farce directly led to the largest bankruptcy event among AI startups since the release of ChatGPT in 2022—this company was valued at over $1.5 billion in its last funding round.
Bankruptcy liquidation announcement of Builder.ai
The official website of Builder.ai is no longer accessible, and only two contact email addresses remain.
In this turmoil, the "big loser" besides Viola Credit, which provided $50 million, is also one of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds, the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), which led a $250 million financing two years ago.
And in the same year, they also invested and became strategic partners with Microsoft. In fact, they even integrated Builder.ai into their cloud services.
Golden Age
Builder.ai was born in London, stemming from its founder Sachin Dev Duggal's dissatisfaction with traditional software development.
In the AI-driven narrative golden age, Builder.ai has a catchy slogan that cannot be ignored: "Making software development as easy as ordering a pizza."
This startup, founded in 2016, claims it can democratize software development by allowing non-engineers to build complex applications through a platform that is purportedly driven by AI.
The promotional slogan of AI is exceptionally effective for investors.
Builder.ai was formerly known as Engineer.ai, a company headquartered in London and Los Angeles that raised $29.5 million in funding from investors including Deepcore Inc. in 2018, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of SoftBank.
Other investors include the Zurich-based venture capital firm Lakestar (an early investor in Facebook Inc. and Airbnb Inc.) and Singapore-based Jungle Ventures.
Founder Sachin Dev Duggal at an early technology conference
By 2022, Builder.ai had raised $195 million and in May 2023, added another $250 million in a funding round led by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA).
In the same year, Microsoft joined as a strategic investor and partner, integrating its Builder.ai platform into its cloud service products.
This has brought immense recognition, and the expectations that follow are equally great.
In the following 8 years, it raised over $445 million in funding, with investors including Microsoft and the Qatar Investment Authority, and the company's valuation also crossed the $1.3 billion mark.
The solution provided by Builder.ai is to combine modular code components with human developers, coordinated by AI.
The platform named "Builder Studio" is equipped with a digital assistant called "Natasha" that promises an AI-driven seamless user experience.
Builder.ai's cool official website is currently completely inaccessible.
But behind this vision is the fact that most of the work is done by developers in India, rather than AI.
In 2019, The Wall Street Journal revealed an embarrassing truth: Builder.ai's AI is more of a marketing gimmick than an engineering breakthrough.
Multiple current and former employees have stated that some of the pricing and scheduling calculations are done by traditional software, and most of the remaining work is also completed manually by employees.
If you tell clients that you are using AI, they are likely not to think of the technology from the 1950s. Decision trees are a very old and simple technology.
These individuals stated that the company lacks natural language processing technology, and that the decision trees used internally should not be considered AI.
As reported, the AI company Builder.ai is "all manual, no intelligence."
The gap between this narrative and reality will determine the company's development trajectory.
There is only artificiality, no intelligence
Signs of deception by Builder.ai are not only found in the 2019 Wall Street Journal report.
According to revelations from several former employees and insiders on Reddit, Builder.ai may have initially had only human involvement, without any intelligence.
Multiple former employees stated that management could not possibly be unaware of the ongoing fraud, but simply turned a blind eye. During two years at this company, I hardly saw any projects being delivered.
Moreover, former employees revealed that Builder.ai drastically reduces employee salaries, even claiming that "the pay is too garbage," and that it is not an AI-oriented company, but rather a marketing-oriented one.
A year ago, a user discovered that he was "incomprehensible" to his Builder.ai services.
Including: extremely poor development experience, lack of modules, code is unusable, unable to access IDE and some code cannot be modified at all.
There are insiders who directly reveal that Builder.ai is actually a company that uses "ai domain names" to commit fraud. The company employs a large number of low-cost developers to "pretend to be AI."
Liquidation Moment
Over time, the rifts within Builder.ai have been widening.
According to insiders, the company has long relied on exaggerated revenue forecasts and AI-related hype to secure funding.
The large global workforce and the costly expansion plans, including the exploration of new markets in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, have led to a continuous rise in the rate of capital consumption.
Meanwhile, the former CEO's legal issues are also emerging one after another.
According to the "Financial Times," Duggal is involved in the investigation of a money laundering criminal case in India. In response, the General Counsel of Builder.ai stated in a now-deleted blog post that Duggal is merely a witness in the case.
However, Duggal resigned as CEO in February but remains on the board and retains his "wizard" title.
He was succeeded by Manpreet Ratia, a former executive at Amazon and Flipkart, who previously served as managing partner at Jungle Ventures, a Builder.ai investor.
Then, the moment of liquidation has arrived.
In May 2025, Viola Credit, one of the senior investors of Builder.ai, seized 37 million USD from the company's account, triggering a default.
Only $5 million in cash remains in the hands of CEO Manpreet Ratia, who took over to clean up the mess just two months ago.
A few days later, he filed for bankruptcy.
It has been proven that Builder.ai provided exaggerated financial forecasts to lenders and misrepresented its revenue health.
This breach of contract allows Viola Credit to take decisive action.
But the greater reason behind this structural collapse is that their business model has never matched their brand promotion.
Ratia admitted during a company-wide conference call that the defeat was inevitable. Most global employees were laid off, and products that were once positioned as flagship innovations in AI have been shelved.
On May 20th, it officially declared bankruptcy.
A month before the failure, the company underwent a last-minute reorganization, laying off 220 of its 770 employees.
Builder.ai stated this week that due to "inability to recover from historical challenges and past decisions, which have put immense pressure on the company's financial situation," the company will appoint an executive to oversee the bankruptcy process, despite management's "relentless efforts."
According to the Financial Times, Builder.ai owes Amazon a total of $85 million and owes Microsoft $30 million.
Entrepreneurial Star
Why was Duggal able to win the favor of investors at the beginning? Whether it was Qatari funds, SoftBank, or Microsoft, they are not easily fooled.
This brings us to mention Duggal's "glamorous" resume.
Sachin Dev Duggal started his career at the age of 14 by assembling PCs, and by the age of 17, he created one of the world's first automated currency arbitrage trading systems for Deutsche Bank.
At the age of 21, while studying at Imperial College, he launched his next entrepreneurial project - a cloud computing company called Nivio.
After leaving Nivio, which was valued at 100 million dollars, Duggal began focusing on creating a photo-sharing app called Shoto.
However, he found it difficult to find front-end developers that met his needs. Duggal couldn't help but wonder: if he himself was struggling to find reliable help, how could someone without an engineering background start building an application?
So, he founded Builder.ai with the aim of making software building "as simple as ordering a pizza."
The story that follows is already known to everyone.
AI whitewashing
In the industry, the model of Builder.ai, which wraps traditional tech services as AI to defraud funds, is referred to as "AI washing."
Its failure has also reignited discussions about the necessity of conducting technical due diligence in AI trading.
For clients, many of whom are startups and small to medium-sized enterprises, this sudden shutdown has left them scrambling to rebuild or migrate their applications. This highlights the risks of relying on emerging players to provide critical mission software infrastructure.
Despite the setback, the broader low-code/no-code market remains resilient.
Gartner predicts that by 2028, 60% of new enterprise applications will be developed using such platforms. It is expected that by the end of this year, the global market size will reach $26 billion.
From Gartner's accolades to Fast Company's rankings, from Popular Investors to the top company logos displayed on their websites, Builder.ai seems to be one of the great success stories of the AI era.
But like many companies built on hype, it confuses scale with sustainability, and notoriety with viability.
Ultimately, the story of Builder.ai is less about a failed technology and more about the consequences of pretending it once worked.
In the investment frenzy driven by ChatGPT, scale, valuation, and exposure do not equal a moat.
The story of Builder.ai is strikingly similar to that of the former Theranos—when there is a one millimeter gap between technological promises and actual capabilities, the capital market will tear open a chasm of one kilometer in the next second.
Reference: