'700 Indian engineers posed as AI': The London startup that took Microsoft for a rideA startup that raised $445 million claiming to revolutionize app development with artificial intelligence has collapsed â after it was revealed that the âAIâ behind its operations was, in reality, 700 human engineers based in India.
Builder.ai, once backed by tech giants including Microsoft, marketed itself as a no-code platform powered by an AI assistant called âNatasha,â which could supposedly build software like assembling Lego bricks. But as Ebern Finance founder Bernhard Engelbrecht highlighted in a widely shared post on X, Natasha wasnât an algorithm â it was a large manual operation disguised as machine intelligence.
Commenting on the unraveling, Ebern Finance founder Bernhard Engelbrecht described it in a widely circulated post on X: âCustomer requests were sent to the Indian office, where 700 Indians wrote code instead of AI,â adding that the end products were often buggy, dysfunctional, and difficult to maintain. âEverything was like real artificial intelligence â except that none of it was.â
https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/700-indian-engineers-posed-as-ai-the-london-startup-that-took-microsoft-for-a-ride-478514-2025-05-31