Sachin Dev Duggal, the founder and self-proclaimed “chief wizard” of Builder.ai, raised over half a billion dollars from some of the world’s top technology investors with a simple pitch: it could use artificial intelligence to make building apps “as easy as ordering pizza”.
The likes of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and Microsoft are now facing up to the growing realisation that they may have backed a business that largely reported artificial revenues.
London-based Builder.ai collapsed last month after an internal investigation found evidence of potentially bogus sales, with revenues previously reported under Duggal’s watch restated to just a quarter of previous estimates.