Engineer.ai to double India workforce

Engineer.ai, which provides an artificial intelligence platform to build and run applications and websites, said it will double its India headcount from 150 to 300 by the end of April, The Economic Times (ET) reported.

The company will also ramp up its operations in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US), said chief executive Sachin Dev Duggal in the ET report. "Half the additions will be deep engineering talent, while the rest would be customer and product experts," said Duggal.

While the venture is cash flow positive, with $24 million in revenue last year, 70% of the $29.5 million funds raised in November will be used to scale up technology, said Duggal. 

Engineer.ai already has 32,000 engineers to customise its core product Builder in line with the clients’ needs, said the ET report. 

The company’s Builder platform is an AI-enabled software assembly line. 

In January 2019, Engineer.ai had got into a strategic partnership with DigitalOcean, a cloud provider for app builders. The partnership will provide small and medium enterprises as well as developers a way to create made-to-order software products. 

In June 2018, TechCircle had reported on Builder. San Francisco- and Gurugram-based Engineer.ai had launched the software development platform in partnership with Microsoft in India. The bootstrapped company, which started in 2012, had said persons and enterprises can use Builder to make digital products at twice the speed and less than one-third the cost of traditional software development. 

"Builder makes software development as easy as ordering pizza," co-founder Duggal had told TechCircle. Duggal added that Builder, cofounded by Saurabh Doot, adopts an assembly-line approach to software making: “We can work on software development piece by piece, because we have partnerships with 60 global firms that supply us engineers when they are not working on projects." 

Engineer.ai has partnerships with Amazon, Microsoft and three top system integrators in India, and has already helped design apps and websites in India. (System integrator is a business that builds computing systems for clients by combining hardware, software, networking and storage products from multiple vendors. Examples include Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys.) The list includes VideoconD2H's consumer-facing app, Eros Now app and the POPxo website. Other customers include Virgin Unite, FundRx and DropIt.