This Startup is Empowering Visionaries in 'Building Their Ideas "40 million companies a year go through some kind of innovation exercise or digital transformation exercise," shares Sachin Dev Duggal, the Founder & CEO of Engineer.ai
By Aastha Singal •
You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
With an early morning meeting hanging above your head and no food to eat in the fridge, who thinks about going for grocery shopping anymore? Especially, when food delivery is only a click away. The cheaper mobile data and smartphones have not only changed the way we live or also transformed the way startups operate.
When even the established corporates couldn't escape digital transformation, how can the emerging ventures do? "40 million companies a year go through some kind of innovation exercise or digital transformation exercise," shares Sachin Dev Duggal, the Founder & CEO of Engineer.ai. Among the biggest challenges of digitization is launching a mobile app.
Filling the Gap
Over 100 million new businesses are set up every year and thanks to the penetration of technology, customers want them available in their mobile phones in form of small icons that they can click and purchase whatever they want. The dilemma, however, is that while demand for apps is increasing, there aren't enough software developers in the world to develop those.
Duggal recognized the gap early on and launched Engineer.ai in 2012. He realized that people don't want to do the repetitive work, even app developers and built an intuitive platform that enables anyone to assemble the complex code necessary to build software in just five easy steps: Ideation, choose recommended features, add existing components or customize them and host your product.
They launched Builder, a Human-Assisted AI app that redesigns how software is created, enabling everyone with an idea in their head to get an app in their hand. "We work with both (app developers and customers)," he shared, adding that the startup is trying to create a mechanism for this new large demand and to accommodate the growing population of app developers together.
Empowering Visionaries
Most ideas today are centred on software but building software is the hardest thing. Most of the visionaries with big ideas don't understand app development. In most cases, people hardly care about the technology that is being used for developing this app. Engineer.ai has a vision of empowering everyone to be able to build their ideas.
"We have 75,000 engineers, developers and designers from around the world that work on our platform. They work for our partners, so they work for about 132 dev shops and we're able to uniquely borrow them to work on specific features for a particular client," he expressed. The builder has a library of reusable building blocks that can be re-utilized whenever needed.
Surprisingly, Engineer.ai is not targeting the digitally aware set of individuals but the people that are not using the software, for instance, the small and medium businesses that are feeling vulnerable due to the explosion of technology. "These are the folks we're going to tell, you now have the power to build your idea without having to write code, without having to understand how by a product manager and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for building software."
Technology Making an Impact
AI has both mystified and demystified an entire part of engineering. Through technology, Engineer.ai was able to associate itself with multiple path-breaking initiatives. "We worked with Virgin unite on the US death penalty campaign, build software around socializing the cause and tracking impact. We've also worked with a charity in the US that's producing prosthetic hands for kids in the Syrian refugee camps that have lost their hands."
Duggal furthered shared, "We work with the Children's Creativity Museum in San Francisco where we created an E-learning platform." The engineer has also been working with brands like BBC weather, Future Group, Rapaport and Eros. Some of our customers in India include folks like Myntra, TataSky, LensKart, Popxo, Dropit and FundRx, he boasted.
In the nutshell, there are over a million potential companies out there that are trying to build something and software is at the heart of all of it. India needs platforms like Builder that are committed to advancing technology adoption and amplify human ingenuity with intelligent technology by infusing AI in everything they do.
