In the long litany of post-Covid tech eulogies, Builder.ai now has pride of place—a unicorn no longer, a billion-dollar dream disbanded in bankruptcy court filings and exposés. At its peak, it was a no-code revolution, a darling of Microsoft, a flagbearer of Indian talent in London. Now, it is mostly a cautionary tale. This particular tale also reveals a great Indian illusion, wrought not by fraud alone, but by the seductive convergence of hope, hype, and habit.

The conceit at the heart of Builder.ai was seductively simple: anyone, anywhere, could build software without writing a single line of code. You would tell “Natasha”—an AI-powered virtual product manager—what you wanted, and she would conjure your app, tailoring it like a couturier with digital scissors. “Zero code, zero headaches,” went the pitch.

Except, the scissors were wielded by 700 human engineers based in India—who, according to former insiders and now widely reported exposés, were asked to behave like AI. It was the mechanical Turk of the 2020s, dressed in neural net robes. They worked from white-labelled vendor firms in Indian cities, some as junior developers, some as testers, and most entirely unaware that the product they were helping deliver was marketed globally as AI-generated.

This wasn’t a startup cutting corners. It was a philosophical sleight of hand. Builder.ai did not invent the idea that humans could temporarily stand in for AI; it merely operationalised it at scale. In doing so, it exposed a broader industry pattern—where AI is not so much a capability as a costume. Everyone is building with AI now, except when they are not. Investors clap for “AI-powered” startups the way colonial anthropologists once applauded ventriloquists: not for the substance, but the spectacle of the act.

Sachin Dev Duggal, Builder.ai’s founder, had all the markings of a modern technocratic messiah. A serial entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, and former chief evangelist at Deutsche Bank, he looked the part: articulate, international, fluent in the dialect of disruption. His LinkedIn biography reads like a business-school case study turned screenplay: started coding at age 12, built an early social commerce platform, secured hundreds of millions in funding.

Excerpts from " Builder.ai and the Unravelling of a Startup Dream,” by V Shoba, published on 03 June, 2025 in OPEN Magazine.

Read the full article here: https://openthemagazine.com/feature/builder-ai-and-the-unravelling-of-a-startup-dream/

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