London-based AI-powered startup caught with human developers from India writing code based on customer requests, posing as AI

London-based startup Builder.ai, once valued at $1.5 billion, has filed for bankruptcy. It emerged that its "AI-powered" app development platform was operated by hundreds of Indian engineers, pretending to be artificial intelligence.

The startup raised over $445 million from investors, including Microsoft and the Qatar Investment Authority. 

It assured making software development "as easy as ordering pizza" through its AI assistant, "Natasha."

However, according to the reports, the company was not utilising any AI technology. Human developers in India manually wrote code based on customer requests while the company marketed their work as AI-generated output.

About Builder.ai

"Was it possible to make building software as easy as ordering pizza? Ding! The idea for Builder.ai is born…" said the company.

Builder.ai's dramatic collapse occurred in May 2025, when lender Viola Credit seized $37 million from the firm's accounts after discovering that the startup had inflated its 2024 revenue projections by 300%.

Founded in 2016 by Sachin Dev Duggal, the London unicorn promised $220 million in sales to creditors; however, an independent audit revealed it was actually a revenue of just $50 million.

Also read: India becomes the largest user of ChatGPT globally, surpassing the US (startuppedia.in)

Viral post shares how startup was actually outsourcing work

In a widely circulated post on the social media platform X, Bernhard Engelbrecht, founder of Ebern Finance, claimed that Builder.ai was essentially outsourcing development work to about 700 engineers in India.

He also alleged that customer requests were routed to Indian teams who manually wrote the code, while the company portrayed the output as AI-generated. Many of the resulting applications, he said, were buggy and difficult to maintain.

“The entire setup looked like real AI,” Engelbrecht wrote, “except it wasn’t.”

😃 The Natasha neural network turned out to be 700 Indian programmers

The startup BuilderAI offered to write any application, like in a constructor, by selecting the necessary functions.

In reality, customer requests were sent to the Indian office, where 700 Indians wrote code… pic.twitter.com/lYWipf63cp

— Bernhard Engelbrecht (@BernhardEngel_) May 29, 2025

Also read: ‘This game is rigged’: Indian-origin Berkeley grad claims he created fake founder persona & tricked 27 VCs (startuppedia.in)