Engineer.ai Raises $29.5M From Global VCs To Help Companies Build Their Own Software

Engineer.ai, which has developed a human-assisted AI that aims to empower everyone to build and operate bespoke software, has raised $29.5 million in a Series A round.

Swiss VC firm Lakestar and Singapore’s Jungle Ventures led the financing, which also included participation from Softbank’s DeepCore. The previously bootstrapped Engineer.ai splits its headquarters between Los Angeles and London.

The company describes its “Builder” platform as an “AI-powered software assembly line that breaks projects into small building blocks of re-usable features that are customized by elastic human capacity from around the world.” Essentially, Engineer.ai claims to be able to help companies or organizations develop customized, “completely scalable” apps or software for less time and money than what has been traditionally available—regardless of technical know-how.

While the startup was founded in 2012, Builder was only launched in June 2018. Engineer.ai said it has generated $24 million in revenue since that June launch with hundreds of customers such as BBC, the San Francisco Giants, Virgin, and ZikTruck. Looking ahead, the company said it is set to cross the $100 million revenue mark before the end of 2020. The company claims the round represents one Europe’s largest Series A investments.

Engineer.ai currently has 150 employees globally with offices in Los Angeles, Delhi, and London. Sachin Dev Duggal, co-founder and “chief wizard” of Engineer.ai, expects the company scale to more than 200 within the next six months.

“We created Engineer.ai so that everyone can build an idea without learning to code. The key overall purpose is to move into the mainstream, where entire categories of companies that didn’t consider developing apps before now can,” Duggal told Crunchbase News. “This is effectively a new kind of SaaS where its custom software not just a vanilla service, and where you don’t need to hire an agency to do the work for you.”

Engineer.ai’s target market ranges from solo entrepreneurs to small and medium businesses.

Duggal also told Crunchbase News that Engineer.ai plans to use a large portion of the funding round to grow the company by “ten times – from building the next stage of our platform that lets us scale delivery, to building a bigger and wider library of building blocks that lets our customers get access to more things without having to pay for all the code.” The company also plans to put the money toward customer acquisition, territory expansion, and hiring across the organization.

Lakestar Partner Manu Gupta believes that Engineer.ai’s Builder platform bridges the gap between an idea and a software product to enable it.

“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,” he said in a press release.

Amit Anand, co-founder & managing partner at Jungle Ventures, said his firm are “believers” in Engineer.ai’s total ecosystem. Jungle plans to help the company expand its offerings in emerging Asia with Singapore as a hub.

“Ultimately Engineer.ai’s Builder is the new SaaS; except this time, it’s affordable, custom and actually delivers value to your business and its customers,” Anand said in a written statement.