Engineer.AI lets anyone build apps and raised $29.5 million from SoftBank, Lakestar, Jungle Ventures

Engineer.AI
cofounders Saurabh Dhoot and Sachin Dev Duggal
Engineer.AI

• Custom software creator Engineer.AI has raised $29.5
  million from Lakestar, Jungle Ventures, and SoftBank’s
  AI-focused Deepcore fund.
• Engineer.AI makes it easy for people with modest
  budgets and limited technical know-how to commission a custom
  app, website, or other software from scratch.
• The startup uses AI to price its services and assign
  projects to its network of more than 30,000 engineers.

Engineer.AI, a startup that lets anyone create their own custom
software, has raised $29.5 million in its first round of funding,
led by Lakestar Ventures, Jungle Ventures, and SoftBank’s
Deepcore fund.

The Series A raise is notable for its size and for SoftBank’s
involvement. The Japanese firm has made waves by ploughing money
into startups through its $100 billion Vision Fund, but it also has the
newly established $52 million Deepcore fund.

According to Engineer.AI’s British cofounder Sachin Dev Duggal,
this is Deepcore’s first non-Japanese investment. SoftBank did
not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Engineer.AI’s key product is its Builder tool, which is targeted
at people who want to create an app, ecommerce site, marketplace,
or website for their business but don’t have the technical
know-how or budget to commission developers and designers to
build something bespoke. Duggal gives the example of someone
running a French ski school with 200 instructors wanting a site
and app that connects their different systems, but unable to
afford the requisite $500,000 for custom software.

Engineer.AI

What is particularly clever about Engineer.AI is that it is
efficient. It reuses different building blocks of code over and
over again across its clients’ different apps or services,
meaning there’s often no need to code major, expensive features
from scratch, such as search. A one-off feature that would cost
$30,000 to build from scratch can be offered at a tenth of the
price to customers, because Engineer.AI can keep reusing the same
building blocks of code. Duggal said the most reused building
blocks are built by the top 1% of engineers on the company’s
network of developers.

“It’s an assembly line for making software,” he said. “It’s
reusable building blocks, like car manufacturing, and a lot of
automation.”

As users navigate through Builder and pick out different features
for their app, site, or other software, the site uses a neural
network to come up with a price. Depending on how fast customers
need the project and where they want it built, the software can
be cheap or expensive.

See also:

The 25 most valuable US startups that failed this year

Another aspect of Engineer.AI’s service is “BuilderCare”, a kind
of extended warranty for the software. It costs extra, a little
like Apple’s AppleCare for iPhones.

And who is actually doing all the building?

Duggal says Engineer.AI has 31,500 engineers on its network and
almost 100 developer shops.

Asked how the concept is different to asking freelancers on
Upwork to code something cheaply, he said: “We don’t work with
freelancers, we buy excess capacity from other developer shops.
And there is a lot more control over the individual doing the
work.

“Secondly, unlike something like Upwork, we don’t rely on a user
rating… the bigger score is our AI that grades the [engineer’s] code. We pick the developer that will work on [the software] on
your behalf. And we guarantee quality and price.”

Engineer.AI plans to use the new funding to scale up. It
currently has split headquarters in London and Los Angeles.