London and
LA-based Engineer.ai launched in an invite-only manner two and a half years
ago, bootstrapped by its founders. Its platform combines AI with crowdsourced
teams of designers and developers to build bespoke digital products at — they
say — twice the speed and less than a third of the cost of traditional software
development.
Today it
announced at Web Summit that it has raised one of Europe’s largest Series A
investments at $29.5 million, led by Lakestar and Jungle Ventures, with
participation from SoftBank’s DeepCore. The round is among Europe’s largest
A-rounds to date.
Engineer.ai’s
“Builder” product breaks projects into small “building blocks” of re-usable
features that are customized by human engineers all over the world, making the
process cheaper than the average process.
Sachin Dev
Duggal, founder, said in a statement: “We created Engineer.ai so that everyone
can build an idea without learning to code. This investment round validates our
approach of making bespoke software effortless. The capital comes at a time of
rapid growth and will propel the platform into the mainstream, allowing Builder
to open the door for entire categories of companies that could not consider it
before.”
Dev Duggal
added: “At a certain level we compete with Gigster albeit we have really taken
a very different approach (assembly line and buying excess capacity from over
100 Dev shops in 10 timezones) whereas they are a modern-day consulting shop.
This means we have massive scale with access to 32,000 devs and designers, we
have over 500 building blocks that save our customers paying for features (code
and designs) that we have already done. The dev shops thus also don’t compete
with us as we buy capacity from them and will soon be offering them a way to
partner on goto market.”
Amit Anand,
co-founder and managing partner at Jungle Ventures, said: “We’re believers in
Engineer.ai’s total ecosystem; making Bespoke Software like the iPhone with
aftercare and a marketplace for all recurring services.”
“Software is
the centre of every business today and the market has been waiting for a
solution that eliminates technical barriers to build software so that everyone
can engage in the new economy,” said Manu Gupta, partner at Lakestar. “By
creating an AI-powered assembly line combined with the best global human
talent, Engineer.ai’s Builder bridges the gap between an idea and a software
product to enable it.”
Launched in
June 2018, Engineer.ai has been used to create products like BBC, DiditFor,
Manscore and ZikTruck.
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