The founder of Builder.ai is a past holder of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
Builder.ai sold a product called “Natasha,” which claimed to make building a website or an app as easy as ordering a pizza.
An executive hired to run the company sued Builder.ai alleging that the company had two sets of books, one with fake numbers for investors, one with the real numbers.
A source told the New York Times that the company’s revenue for 2023 was reported as $157 million but was actually $42 million and, for 2024, the reported revenue was $217 million but actually $51 million.
Last May it was alleged that Natasha was not an AI programme but 700 Indian programmers leading to internet jokes that .ai stood for ‘Actually Indians’.
Builder.ai is currently being wound up in a Delaware court.
The NYT points out that, at the current rate of registration there will be 1 million companies with the suffix ai.after their names by Christmas. At the height of the dot.com boom there were only 10,000 companies registered with the suffix .com.
Beware.
