Karthik started working as a “productologist” for Builder.ai in 2022. In another company, the role — assisting customers in building software — might have been called aproduct manager. But “productologist” relayed the buzzy way the U.K.-based startup billed itself: as a low-code or no-code artificial intelligence tool that made creating apps and websites as easy as “ordering pizza.” The job title, Karthik told Rest of World, was “confusing in the start.”
By the time he joined, Builder.ai was on its way to becoming one of the world’shottest startups. It promised to use AI to radically simplify, and automate, the normally time-consuming and technically tedious process of building products. This was via two signature pieces of tech. The first were pre-coded blocks of reusable features — such as user logins, payment platform integrations, or contact pages — in the form of a library that would make software development something like putting together a Lego set. Second was a proprietary AI tool the company advertised as revolutionary, able to drastically reduce human labor and compress “weeks of work into hours and minutes.”
Customers interacted with an AI chatbot named Natasha, which the company said would synthesize client requirements and start the building process for productologists like Karthik, who would get the project customized and on its way to completion. CEO Sachin Dev Duggal, who also had the title of “chief wizard,” claimed the AI could use its library of building blocks to construct at least 80% of an app or web site on its own. “Usually, the majority of the work is done in the first couple of hours” before human engineers take over, he said at a 2018 event.
Builder.ai founder Sachin Dev Duggal. Getty Images
Headquartered in London — with operations in Los Angeles, New Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, and Singapore — Builder.ai marketed to smaller companies without the engineering teams or budgets to build software. Enticed by its promise, investors poured $100 million into Builder.ai’s series C round of funding in March 2022. After later raising money from Microsoft and others, the company would go on to ultimately be valued at $1.5 billion, with over 500 employees. Karthik, who asked to go by a pseudonym to avoid commenting publicly on a prior employer, joined as a remote worker in India soon after the series C round. He was excited to work in a customer-facing role.
But the reality of Builder.ai’s operations differed greatly from the sleek and speedy AI experience it promised, according to recent interviews with ex-employees, past reporting by The Wall Street Journal, and a lawsuit filed by the company’s one-time chief business officer. Rest of World spoke to a dozen former Builder.ai employees from India, the U.S., and the U.K., including four on the product side, to get an inside look at the company’s ups and downs — and explore the question of what kind of product it really offered. Most requested anonymity to avoid hurting their prospects with new employers. Although Builder.ai did use AI for relatively basic tasks, former employees said, it relied on staff and outsourced developers in countries including India and Ukraine to do the vast majority of its work.
With humans handling the bulk of development work, delivery timelines were often longer than many clients expected. Two former employees said customers were often frustrated, and some prospective clients walked away after hearing how long their projects would take to complete. Karthik described the reaction of one potential customer: “They were like, ‘We had an expectation that we would get something within a month because this is an AI-assisted development platform, and you said you build faster.’”
Some companies seem to think, “let’s just put AI on everything, and we’ll be fine.”
In March, Bloomberg reported the company — which had been without a chief financial officer since 2023 — had inflated revenues. Soon after, Israeli lending firm Viola Credit seized most of Builder.ai’s cash. Another Bloomberg report in May alleged Builder.ai and an Indian content company called VerSe had faked income by billing each other for services in a practice known as “roundtripping.” (VerSe told the publication the allegations were “absolutely baseless and false.”) Builder.ai filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. last month.
Now, some analysts are holding up Builder.ai as a potential case of “AI washing,” in which companies falsely promote products or services as AI to attract attention and funding. Last year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission launched a crackdown on tech companies it charged with false and misleading statements about their use of AI. These included one startup that called itself the “first regulated AI financial advisor,” and another that claimed to rely on voice recognition to run drive-through restaurants. The agency found that the companies had either misrepresented their AI capabilities or required far more human labor than advertised.
Carrie Osman, founder of the London-based tech consultancy Cruxy, called Builder.ai an example of a desperate drive toward valuation and funding at the expense of revenue. With so much investment being channeled into AI, she told Rest of World, some companies seem to think, “let’s just put AI on everything, and we’ll be fine.”
Builder.ai was founded in 2016 by Duggal, a high-flying serial British-Indian entrepreneur.At the time, AI-powered startups — which claimed to do everything from stopping cyberattacks to operating autonomous vehicles — had raised $5 billion around the world.Initially bootstrapped, Builder.ai received $29.5 million in its first major funding round in late 2018, in what was then reported as one of Europe’s largest ever series A investments.
A senior software engineer joined the company shortly afterward. “I really believed in the product when we initially got brought on,” he told Rest of World. “It was kind of taking this idea of traditional software consultancy, and automating it as much as possible.”
Questions about the company’s promised tech soon emerged. In August 2019, TheWall Street Journal reported it was exaggerating its use of AI, according to current and former employees, and that most of its coding was done by humans. Earlier that year, the company’s former chief business officer had filed a wrongful termination suit, in which he accused Duggal of raising funds on proprietary tech that was “nothing more than smoke and mirrors.”
The company disputed the suit, which was ultimately settled. A spokesperson told the Journal at the time that Duggal had been clear the company’s AI technology was human-assisted. Lawyers representing Builder.ai in its U.S. bankruptcy case and a spokesperson for the company, who has since left her role, did not respond to requests for comment from Rest of World.
Manpreet Ratia, Builder.ai’s CEO at the time of its demise, also didn’t respond to a comment request. In a pair of LinkedIn posts, he denied that the company had misled people about its technology. “Builder.ai built a real AI-powered platform — combining LLM models and our own orchestration layers — to automate meaningful parts of the software assembly process,” he wrote. “It wasn’t a gimmick. It wasn’t smoke and mirrors.”
The company’s employees had created “a sophisticated, production-grade system,” he continued. “They built something real. And it worked.”
The senior software engineer said that while the company was aiming to build something “revolutionary,” it failed to materialize. “I think Sachin was a very good marketer and had a vision of how he expected things to be,” he told Rest of World. “Unfortunately, his vision didn’t match the reality a lot of the time.”
Yet Builder.ai continued raising money. After its series C in March 2022, Duggal said he cried tears of joy. By then, the company was claiming to “build software and apps up to 6x faster and up to 70% cheaper than traditional human teams.”
For employees, it was a wild ride.
Tanmay, a productologist who joined the company’s India office in 2022, told Rest of World he was drawn to the promise of using AI for development and impressed by the accessibility of Duggal and his senior team. “They were all just a Slack message away,” he said, requesting to use a pseudonym. But the company’s use of AI, he said, was still “not much.” Most of the work continued to be handled by humans.
Builder.ai’s showroom at the World Economic Forum in Davos, 2024. Getty Images
That summer, Builder.ai held an international off-site meeting at a five-star hotel in Singapore. Close to 400 employees gathered from 33 countries. In one session, Serena Williams’ coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, called in via video conference to tell employeeshow they, too, could perform like champions. Tanmay, who attended the off-site, recalled the “grandeur and product vision.”
“The founder said that we would be building 77 apps per day if we reach the pinnacle of our technology,” he told Rest of World. “That’s what I remember.”
ChatGPT launched a few months later, in November 2022, accelerating AI hype and showcasing how large language models could create pages of code with just a few prompts. Builder.ai’s biggest funding round came in May 2023, with a $250 million investment led by the Qatar Investment Authority. Around the same time, the company announced a partnership with Microsoft and joined the ranks of OpenAI and Disney on Fast Company’s annual list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies.
Potential customers who visited the Builder.ai website before it was shuttered in June could book a demo with Natasha, the AI chatbot, who appeared as a woman’s voice behind a pulsing purple dot, ready to talk them through what they were hoping to build. Natasha could even recommend features from the company’s repository of building blocks, which could be added on to an order like products to a shopping cart.
When Natasha launched in September 2021, Builder.ai called it the “world’s first AI-powered product manager.” It said Natasha would run projects in real time, speeding up the process dramatically. As the interface between customers and productologists, Natasha would help translate ideas into features, set timelines, and calculate budgets. “Imagine a world where you can pick up the phone, speak to Natasha, and three days later have your app in the app store,” Duggal said at the time. “This is the future we are building towards.”
An archived image from Builder.ai’s now-shuttered website.
“The end goal — as the founder Sachin said — was to make it as easy as ordering a pizza,” said a productologist who was with the company for two years until just before its insolvency. “You talk to Natasha online, you tell her what you need, and then we build, refine, and use Natasha to build and refine.”
In reality, this person said, much of the work was done by human coders via outsourcing companies, which Builder.ai referred to as “capacity partners.” Natasha mostly generated some “front-end” code and user interface. But even that needed to be checked by human coders. “A lot of the customized work was done by humans,” the productologist said. “Some things from the AI-generated code needed reworks as well.”
The use of outsourcing companies further delayed timelines, half a dozen employees said. “Builder said it’s an AI company, so obviously when you have AI you cannot have so many developers on your company payroll,” another former product manager told Rest of World, requesting anonymity. He called the capacity partner model “a really messed-up system.”
The hope internally,fourformer employees said, was that Builder.ai would continue to build out its library of reusable code even as the coding work was being outsourced, while also feeding data into Natasha to improve the company’s AI abilities. As an AI company, they needed to gather data, Tanmay said. “Natasha would learn and get better — for creating codes, creating product road maps.”
This didn’t happen as quickly as these employees expected. “The company was trying to make Natasha smarter, but the pace did not really match the pace at which Builder was taking jobs,” Karthik said.
Instagram posts from Builder.ai promoting Natasha in late 2024.
In the fall of 2022, Anurag Gulati, a new entrepreneur from Bengaluru, was keen to build a dating app. He wanted it to match people based on quizzes and games, and was on the lookout for a technical team to help turn the idea into reality. He stumbled upon Builder.ai on a startup forum. “It looked really legit,” Gulati told Rest of World.
After speaking with a “really smart” sales team at Builder.ai — who gave him an estimate of around $10,000 — Gulati says he decided to go with the company rather than hire his own tech team. “Building an app is like making a film. There’s so many moving parts,” Gulati said. “I didn’t have any issues giving them that chance.”
After making a deposit of around $500, Gulati continued with weekly payments, but gradually began to realize “that no way in the world this could be done” in the promised timeline. The company’s process was slow, he said, and at times the prototypes his productologist shared seemed to be getting “worse.”
As Gulati continued waiting for his app, he saw that Builder.ai had co-sponsored a major startup convention on the outskirts of New Delhi. The three-day event was advertised as a place where founders could pitch to thousands of investors, and showcase their products to big-name brands. Promotional materials suggested that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, and X’s Elon Musk might attend.
Intrigued, Gulati traveled to Delhi. He visited the Builder.ai stall, stationed in the midst of the convention center. “They were demonstrating how the entire product worked,” Gulati recalled. “It looked so fancy, and the UI was so good, at least on the website, where you feel like you with your [own] hands are making an app that looks exactly like Instagram.”
It looked so fancy, and the UI was so good, at least on the website.
But miffed attendees soon realized the event didn’t feature many of the investors or big names it had promised. Videos circulated on social media showed hundreds of attendees crowded at the conference podium questioning organizers in chaotic scenes. “It was a sad sob-fest in the name of a startup convention,” Gulati recalled. (When the convention organizers were accused of misleading ticketholders, Builder.ai told the BBC it was “extremely disappointed” with the event and sought to revoke its sponsorship.)
When Gulati received early prototypes of his app, it was “very buggy,” he said, and not really what he’d asked for. By then he’d paid around $7,000, with around $3,000 pending. He used those funds to hire a tech team, and his startup slowly built the product itself, eventually pivoting from a dating app to a social-meetup platform. “I realized that if I keep paying them, I would have to probably wait another 2–3 months and spend more and eventually get nothing,” Gulati said. “I might as well use that money to build my own product.”
Builder.ai was “always overpitching” itself, Gulati said. “It’s great sales but zero execution.”
Lawyers for Builder.ai told the Financial Times last year that Gulati had given the company full marks for customer satisfaction before walking away from his contract, which Gulati denied.
Like several other employees, Karthik, the productologist, told Rest of World he was proud of the work he’d done at Builder.ai and disappointed the company hadn’t lived up to its promise. He recalled that customers often canceled projects or refused to pay because of delays and missed benchmarks. Many of them, he said, had “started planning product launches against the [promised] deadlines. When these deadlines were not met, it really felt bad, because a person has risked his or her future on Builder’s commitment.”
The Builder.ai logo at the 2024 Web Summit Qatar. Getty Images
After Builder.ai’s May 2023 funding round put its valuation over $1 billion, the company said it would use the fresh capital to invest in more talent.The new additions included a finance professional based in India who reported to senior leadership, and requested anonymity.
He questioned how the company had spent the $250 million it had raised: “Why would you have so much burn?”
In retrospect, this former employee believes Builder.ai was a good idea, but that the company failed to run its business well. Outsourcing so much of its work to its capacity partners, he said, caused delays and raised costs. While Builder.ai did have a library of “reusable” product features, it was “not to the extent they marketed.”
“They were never transparent about the company’s financials,” another frustrated former employee told Rest of World. “They raised over $445 million. … Where did all the money go?”
Where did all the money go?
In March 2025, Ratia, an executive with Builder.ai investor Jungle Ventures, became the new CEO after Duggal stepped down from the position. The company drastically reduced its head count by 270 employees. Shortly afterward, Bloomberg reported Builder.ai had raised an emergency loan the previous year, from a syndicate of firms, by forecasting its 2024 revenues to be four times higher than they turned out to be.
“The new CEO was giving his level best to fix things, but I believe the damage was done,” said a former project manager, who was with the company for 1.5 years until its insolvency.
On the evening of May 20, hundreds of employees gathered from around the world for a remote town hall. Ratia made a shocking announcement: Builder.ai had run out of money. The company was filing for bankruptcy, and they were all being let go.
“We all lost our jobs within 30 mins,” recalled one former product manager — who was on a client call when he learned he no longer had a job.
“I inherited a business that had suffered from financial mismanagement and poor Ops discipline. That part is not in dispute,” Ratia wrote later in his LinkedIn posts. “But the way we handled it matters. We acted with openness and transparency from day one.”
He added: “THIS IS NOT A STORY ABOUT FAKE AI. It’s a story about a company that had to clean up its financial past — and nearly did. It’s a story about resilience. About real technology. About a team that never gave up.”
Builder.ai’s demise presents an odd twist for former employees like Karthik: Early in his tenure, he said, the company had told him the goal was to have its AI make roles like his redundant. Now that has happened — but not at all according to plan. “AI was always the assistant, and it was becoming better and better at being an assistant,” he said. But that’s all it was: an assistant. “It was still a long way from capturing the complete requirements.”
The UK economy failed to grow in July, according to the latest official figures.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the economy saw zero growth in the month, following a 0.4% expansion in June.
However, monthly figures are volatile, and over the three months to the end of July, the economy grew by 0.2% compared with the previous three months, the ONS said.
The government is under mounting pressure to deliver on its key priority of boosting economic growth ahead of the Budget on 26 November.
The UK’s statistics body said the service sector performed well, helped by the health sector, computer programming and office support services.
However, this was offset by a weak performance in the manufacturing sector.
In the Budget, Chancellor Rachel Reeves will outline the government’s tax and spending plans with increasing speculation she will have to raise taxes to meet her self-imposed fiscal rules.
Yael Selfin, chief economist at KPMG UK, said the “weak start to the third quarter [is] a sign of things to come”.
“Economic activity is expected to slow in the second half of the year as the temporary factors which pushed up growth in the first half of 2025 begin to fade,” she said.
“Additionally, the later date of the Autumn Budget could prolong some uncertainties for businesses, delaying investment decisions and acting as a drag on growth until more clarity emerges.”
Responding to the latest growth figures, a Treasury spokesperson said: “We know there’s more to do to boost growth because whilst our economy isn’t broken, it does feel stuck.
“That’s the result of years of underinvestment, which we’re determined to reverse through our plan for change.
Shadow chancellor Sir Mel Stride said: “Any economic growth is welcome – but this government is distracted from the problems the country is facing.
“While the government lurch from one scandal to another, borrowing costs recently hit a 27-year high – a damning vote of no confidence in Labour that makes painful tax rises all but certain.”
How the massive immigration raid on a Georgia car plant unfolded
More than 300 South Koreans who were detained in a massive immigration raid at a Hyundai plant in the US state of Georgia last week are due to arrive home on Friday.
Their return comes as the country’s president and Hyundai’s chief executive have warned about the impact of the raid.
A chartered Korean Air jet carrying the workers and 14 non-Koreans who were also detained in the raid took off from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport at midday local time on Thursday (17:00 BST). One South Korean national has reportedly chosen to stay in the US to seek permanent residency.
The plane is expected to arrive at Incheon International Airport at about 15:30 Seoul time (07:30 GMT) on Friday.
The departure was delayed by more than a day because of an instruction from the White House, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said on Thursday.
President Donald Trump ordered the pause to check whether the workers were willing to remain in the US to continue working and training Americans, according to a South Korean foreign ministry official.
The BBC has contacted the White House for comment.
“The situation is extremely bewildering,” Lee added, while noting it is common practice for Korean firms to send workers to help set up overseas factories.
“If that’s no longer allowed, establishing manufacturing facilities in the US will only become more difficult… making companies question whether it’s worth doing at all,” he added.
Seoul is negotiating with Washington on visa options for South Korean workers “whether that means securing [higher] quotas or creating new visa categories”, Lee said.
On Friday, the South Korean foreign ministry said it had called for the US Congress to support a new visa for Korean firms.
During meetings with US senators in Washington this week, Foreign Minister Cho Hyun reiterated concerns among South Koreans over the arrests, the ministry said in a statement.
Mr Muñoz told US media that the raid will create “minimum two to three months delay [in opening the factory] because now all these people want to get back”.
AFP
A Korean Air plane has been chartered to bring more than 300 South Korean workers home from the US
Last week, US officials detained 475 people – more than 300 of them South Korean nationals – who they said were working illegally at the battery facility, one of the largest foreign investment projects in Georgia.
LG Energy Solution, which operates the plant with Hyundai, said that many of its employees who were arrested had various types of visas or were under a visa waiver programme.
A worker at the plant spoke to the BBC about the panic and confusion during the raid. The employee said the vast majority of the workers detained were mechanics installing production lines at the site, and were employed by a contractor.
South Korea, a close US ally in Asia, has pledged to invest tens of billions of dollars in America, partly to offset tariffs.
Media in the country have described the raid as a “shock,” with the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper warning that it could have “a chilling effect on the activities of our businesses in the United States”.
The Yonhap News Agency published an editorial on Thursday urging the two countries to “cooperate to repair cracks in their alliance”.
The timing of the raid, as the two governments engage in sensitive trade talks, has raised concern in Seoul.
The White House has defended the operation at the Hyundai plant, dismissing concerns that the raid could deter foreign investment.
On Sunday, US President Donald Trump referenced the raid in a social media post and called for foreign companies to hire Americans.
The US government would make it “quickly and legally possible” for foreign firms to bring workers into the country if they respected its immigration laws, Trump said.
Around the world, health care workers are in short supply, with a shortage of 4.5 million nurses expected by 2030, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
That’s where Nurabot comes in. The autonomous, AI-powered nursing robot is designed to help nurses with repetitive or physically demanding tasks, such as delivering medication or guiding patients around the ward.
According to Foxconn, the Taiwanese multinational behind Nurabot, the humanoid can reduce nurses’ workload by up to 30%.
“This is not a replacement of nurses, but more like accomplishing a mission together,” says Alice Lin, director of user design at Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Technology Group in Taiwan.
By taking on repetitive tasks, Nurabot frees up nurses for “tasks that really need them, such as taking care of the patients and making judgment calls on the patient’s conditions, based on their professional experience,” Lin told CNN in a video call.
Nurabot, which took just 10 months to develop, has been undergoing testing at a hospital in Taiwan since April 2025 — and now, the company is readying the robot for commercial launch early next year. Foxconn does not currently have an estimate for its retail price.
Foxconn partnered with Japanese robotics company Kawasaki Heavy Industries to build Nurabot’s hardware.
The firm adapted Kawasaki’s “Nyokkey” service robot model, which moves around autonomously on wheels, uses its two robotic arms to lift and hold items, and has multiple cameras and sensors to help it recognize its surroundings.
Based on itsinitial research on nurses’ daily routines and pain points — such as walking long distances across the ward to deliver samples — Foxconn added features, like a space to safely store bottles and vials.
The robot uses Foxconn’s Chinese large language model for its communication, while US tech giant NVIDIA provided Nurabot’s core AI and robotics infrastructure. NVIDIA says it combined multiple proprietary AI platforms to create Nurabot’s programming, which enables the bot to navigate the hospital independently, schedule tasks, and react to verbal and physical cues.
AI was also used to train and test the robot in a virtual version of the hospital, which Foxconn says helped its speedy development.
AIallows Nurabot to “perceive, reason, and act in a more human-like way” and adapt its behavior “based on the specific patient, context, and situation,” David Niewolny, director of business development for health care and medical at NVIDIA, told CNN in an email.
Staffing shortages aren’t the only issue facing the health care sector.
The world’selderly population is growing rapidly: the number of people aged 60 and over is expected to increase by 40% by 2030, compared to 2019, according to the WHO. By the mid-2030s, the UN predicts that the number of individuals aged 80 and older will outnumber infants.
Over the past decade, the number of health care workers has steadily increased, but not fast enough to beat population growth and aging. Southeast Asia is expected to be one of the worst-impacted regions for health care workforce shortages.
With these impending stressors on the health care system, AI-enhanced systems can provide huge time and cost savings, says nursing and public health professor Rick Kwan, associate dean at Tung Wah College in Hong Kong.
“AI-assisted robots can really replace some repetitive work, and save lots of manpower,” says Kwan.
There will be challenges, though: Kwan highlights patient preference for human interaction and the need for infrastructure changes in hospitals.
“You can look at the hospitals in Hong Kong: very crowded and everywhere is very narrow, so it doesn’t really allow robots to travel around,” says Kwan. Hospitals are designed around human needs and systems, and if robots are to become central to the workflow, this will need to be reimagined in hospital design going forward, he adds.
Safety is also paramount, says Kwan — not just in terms of mitigating physical risks, but the development of ethical and data protection protocols, too — and he encourages a slow and cautious approach that allows for rigorous testing and assessment.
Robots are not entirely new to health care: surgical robots, like da Vinci, have been around for decades and help improve accuracy during operations.
But increasingly, free-moving humanoids are assisting hospital staff and patients.
In Singapore, Changi General Hospital currently has more than 80 robots helping doctors and nurses with everything from administrative work to medicine delivery.
And in the US, nearly 100 “Moxi” autonomous health care bots, built by Texas-based Diligent Robots with NVIDIA’s AI platforms, carry medications, samples, and supplies across hospital wards, according to NVIDIA.
But the jury is still out on how helpful nursingrobots are to staff. A recent review of robots in nursing found that, while there was a perception among nursesof increased efficiency and reduced workload, there is a lack of experiential evidence to confirm this — and technical malfunctions, communication difficulties and the need for ongoing training all presented challenges.
Tech companies are investing heavily health care: in addition to NVIDIA, the likes ofAmazon and Google are both exploring new opportunitiesin the $9.8 trillion health care market.
The smart hospital sector is a small, but rapidly expanding, component of this. It was estimated at $72.24 billion in 2025, according to market research company Mordor Intelligence, with the Asia Pacific region the fastest-growing market.
Nurabot is currently being piloted in Taichung Veterans General Hospital in Taiwan, on a ward that treats diseases associated with the lungs, face and neck, including lung cancer and asthma.
During this experimental phase, the robot has limited access to the hospital’s data system, and Foxconn is “stress testing” its functionality on the ward. This includes tracking metrics like the reduction in walking distance for nurses and the delivery accuracy, as well as qualitative feedback from patients and nurses. Early results indicate that Nurabot is reducing the daily nursing workload by around 20–30%, according to Foxconn.
Taichung Veterans General Hospital declined to comment on Nurabot for this story.
According to Lin, Nurabot will be formally integrated into daily nursing operations later this year, including connecting to the hospital information system and running tasks autonomously, ahead of its commercial debut in early 2026.
While Nurabot won’t solve the lack of nurses, Lin says it can help “alleviate the problems caused by an aging society, and hospitals losing talent.”
