Matt Wolfe says Builder AI raised $450 million at a $1.5 billion valuation from Microsoft and SoftBank while claiming to use AI, but actually had 700 engineers in India manually writing code. He alleges the company also faked business deals to inflate its value.
Over $450 million.
$1.5 billion.
Approximately 700 engineers.
Microsoft, Qatar Investment, and SoftBank.
This company, builder AI, actually faked its AI with 700 engineers based in India. This company raised over $450 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion from investors like Microsoft, Qatar Investment and SoftBank. But behind the curtain, it was actually 700 engineers and not AI. These engineers manually wrote code for client projects while the company portrayed the work as a high generator. This is really interesting to me because in a world where most companies are that they're trying to use AI because they don't want the world to know they're using AI, this company took the other direction and claimed they were using AI while actually hiring more and more employees to do the work that they claimed was AI. But the story doesn't actually end there. Not only did they claim they were trying to use AI when they were actually using engineers in India to build products, when people gave them prompts, they were actually faking business deals to raise the valuation of the company.
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