
Engineer.ai raises $29.5M Series A for its AI+Humans software building platform - Sequenza
https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/06/engineer-ai-raises-29-5m-series-a-for-its-aihumans-software-building-platform/
======
seibelj
Anyone remember "The Grid"? I wrote a post about it a few years ago.[0]
Essentially it was a scam where "AI will replace web developers!" and raised a
few million in VC. Be very careful of buzz words and companies claiming to
replace engineers with AI.

[0] [https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-grid-over-promise-under-
deli...](https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-grid-over-promise-under-deliver-and-
the-lies-told-by-ai-startups-40aa98415d8e)

~~~
option_greek
Anyone actually used their builder product ? I signed up but apparently I have
to 'invite' 5 or more 'friends' to get early access. Feels like a vapor-ware.

~~~
mattmg83
I used it (a year later than I was expecting) and it was so bad it was
worthless. I brought in with low expectations and it didn't even meet them. It
was slow, unresponsive and cranked out sites 10x worse than you could do in
squarespace or wix if you invested 20 minutes or bought a template

~~~
sachmans
Hey Matt, please email me s at engineer dot ai and I'd love to see how we
messed this up. Clearly we didn't do a good enough job and I want to make sure
we make it right.

------
komali2
>Engineer.ai’s “Builder” product breaks projects into small ‘building blocks’
of re-usable features that are customized by human engineers all over the
world, making the process cheaper than the average process

There doesn't appear to be AI involved. A very good business model, but no AI.

What I expected the founder to say was "we've proven people want our product,
now we can scale it even further by building the ai tool we always wanted to
build," but I don't see that.

~~~
wpietri
This is the part that got me: "... everyone can build an idea without learning
to code"

I went to my first tech conference when I was 13. One of the hot items was a
tool that made programmers unnecessary. It was targeted at cheapskate
businesspeople. Decades later the company is long dead. But the suckers are
still out there. They think that coding is the hard part, in the same way that
they think the hard part about building a house is nailing things together.
But in both cases, the part you're really paying for is expertise: good
development firms and good homebuilders know how to turn hazy human desires
into very specific implementations, while also shaping those desires to be
reasonable and achievable.

~~~
losteric
Ideas are a dime a dozen. The hard part is always the asking the right
questions and collecting the right data to filter out bad ideas and refine
good ideas into practical products.

~~~
sachmans
You've hit it on the nail - assembling code or building a programmatically
controlled ESB is not rocket science - asking the right questions, and being
able to get people to spec without knowing "how to code" or "understanding"
tech is much harder. This is where have spent a large portion of our time in
building out the "Studio" where you can choose templates, or problem sets and
then we organize "features" and "workflow" logic behind it. The entire
lifecycle is designed around the idea of an assembly process rather than a
consulting - so its more prescriptive (we ask a lot of questions upfront) -
its important to note that you still get connected to a human product manager,
and there are designers from the capacity side (we work with over 100 dev
shops around the world that give us designers and developers).

------
ppeetteerr
> "They charge you for every line of code, we bill you for what’s unique."*

What this means to their clients is that if the client hires Engineer.ai to
build something, their next client can get the same product for free. Good
luck with that, Engineer.ai.

* [https://www.engineer.ai/how-it-works](https://www.engineer.ai/how-it-works)

~~~
inetsee
I would be astonished if the next client gets it for free. The next client
might get it for less than it cost the first client, but Engineer.ai has to
pay back those investors.

~~~
keithwhor
False - venture capital is not debt.

They can do whatever they feel like doing.

~~~
hackerman12345
You're confusing investment with constraint-free donation.

~~~
keithwhor
I assure you that I have never confused the two. :)

Venture investment at this level of sophistication typically involves the
purchase of equity in a company with the general expectation that the value of
the investment will increase over time, as valued by other actors in the
market. However, at this stage there are little to no financial or legal
negative repercussions for a company failing to meet this expectation as long
as they've acted ethically. (I mean, outside of the value of equity going to
zero and having to shut down the company.)

There are forms of investment, or vehicles of financing - venture debt and
specific types of convertible notes - that have the expectation of repayment
given a timeframe, but they're not typically what we're talking about when we
talk about modern venture investment and straightforward equity transactions
(like a Series A here).

In fact, YC explicitly _invented_ the SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future
Equity) as a way to prevent "bad actor" investors from asking for returns from
convertible notes ("repayment") and sinking companies early. The unwritten
rule in venture investing in SV was literally, "don't ask for your money
back," some Angels were screwing companies over by doing exactly that, so the
SAFE codified protection against it into a low-friction investment vehicle.

tl;dr: Investment is not constraint-free, but there is certainly not an
expectation of "repayment." It might seem a little semantic (versus, say,
"generating returns") but it's important people understand the difference
between equity transactions and debt - the constraints exist but they differ
and, as such, incentivize behavior, growth and spend differently as well.

------
twodave
How is this AI? It looks like they're just building interfaces and then
outsourcing implementations of them. I'm not saying it's not a smart strategy,
but what makes it AI?

~~~
gcb0
it's just to attract investors. see how the top comment is about this being
the future of the universe or some other TED talk-level BS? it works.

they are just an outsorce provider. plain and simple.

~~~
sachmans
small correction - we are not an outsourced providers - about 40-60% of the
building process is machine operated - the rest is human - and those humans
come from our network of devshops - but we don't outsource it to them - we
pick the individual engineers we want to work on the problem basis our rating
system. ([https://snag.gy/XgJfny.jpg](https://snag.gy/XgJfny.jpg)) will show
you what experience our Capacity Partners see.

~~~
gcb0
you described something that is an outsorce operator (from the end client POV)

not trying to pick on you (specially as I have nothing to gain doing so), but
this is exactly how I deal with them. with the option to have the engineers
hosted or remote. Add a beefy ORM with a client UI and they could also claim
50% of the work done by machines...

------
ipsa
Replace "AI" with "software" (which for all intents and purposes it is).

> 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,” said Manu Gupta, Partner at
> Lakestar. “By creating a software powered assembly line combined with the
> best global human talent, Engineer.ai’s Builder bridges the gap between an
> idea and a software product to enable it.”

------
otras
I greatly enjoy AI startup press release bingo.

    
    
      - .ai domain name
      - No mention of how they use or define AI
      - "AI + Humans"
      - Banner picture from science fiction film (Prometheus)
    

(Disclaimer: I used to work at an AI startup and am generally interested in
how companies market themselves)

~~~
yters
"The most valuable businesses of the coming decades will be built by
entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them
obsolete."

"When a cheap laptop beats the smartest mathematicians at some tasks, but even
a supercomputer with 16,000 CPUs can’t beat a child at others, you can tell
that humans and computers are not just more or less powerful than each other –
they’re categorically different."

"Palantir takes a hybrid approach: the computer would flag the most suspicious
transactions on a well designed user interface, and human operators would make
the final judgement as to their legitimacy."

\- Peter Thiel, "Zero to One", Chapter 12

Thiel is going long on these AI+human startups.

~~~
dmreedy
This quote, and the kind of thinking that engenders it (and is engendered by
it), bother me.

Yeah, a cheap laptop can do arithmetic faster than 'the smartest
mathematicians'. And the smartest mathematicians can do arithmetic faster than
many children. Does that make mathematicians and children 'categorically
different things' as well? In some trivial sense, sure, but it doesn't
preclude _any_ kind of connection between the two, or require some deep new
ontological commitments to model.

I'm all for the current practical approach of using 'AI technology' as a human
supplemental. But I'd rather not frame it as (what I perceive) as some kind of
mystic, dualistic argument. At least not until we know more about both.

I also don't really think Peter Thiel is worthy of being the keystone of any
kind of _argumentum ab auctoritate_ in this particular field.

~~~
yters
We can train children to become mathematicians.

~~~
dmreedy
Yes, that's precisely my point.

I've read the rest of what you have to say on this, and it is precisely the
kind of mysticism that bothers me. There are no means of disproving it, it
reduces to dogma in the end, but it's philosophically disingenuous to assert
that because computers and people _feel_ like different things in some cases,
they _must_ be, and then to argue backwards from there; it's question-begging
in the original sense.

~~~
vlovich123
I mean it's clearly obvious that today, "AI" on computers != human.
Unsupervised learning is making leaps & bounds. Even supervised learning isn't
able to solve all problems better than humans even if it can do so on a
staggeringly large amount of problems.

I don't think anyone is positing that that's true forever and all time. It
seems reasonable to bet on AI at some point becoming sophisticated enough to
outperform AI+human. I think it'll happen shortly after the point where AI can
identify a new problem (or class of problems) by itself that it hasn't been
taught about & then build new tools to help itself tackle that problem. After
that it's the singularity because that process repeats ad infinitum. The only
value-add of humans after that is if our creativity is somehow
better/different than & can explore problems in ways the AI can't (& even that
feels like a very short-lived advantage unless there's some crucial
physical/mathematical impossibility standing in the way).

------
blauditore
Why would you write code using AI? If the AI is able to figure out
requirements, why not just let it do it directly, simply speaking?

I always have a hard time to see the benefit of code-generation tools in
general. If you can generate the code for a piece of functionality, you may as
well abstract away primitives for that and make it a one-liner operation in
the code you're writing. If that's not possible, it's probably a shortcoming
of the language, framework or whatever system you're using (which is
admittedly the case sometimes in the real world, because things evolve
slowly).

~~~
adrianN
Code generation can be useful if it produces provably correct code. Any
abstraction you write yourself you still have to test carefully. For example
it's a lot easier and safer to use something that generates statemachines from
descriptions that writing your own statemachine interpreter.

------
melvinram
> AI+Humans

Sounds like just marketing bull __ __. It sounds like they have libraries and
they are using them to spin up apps faster. That might have value if the
libraries are good but that 's clearly not AI.

~~~
amelius
Or perhaps they use Humans first (like Mechanical Turks), and plan to replace
them later by AI when the technology is there.

~~~
marmaduke
What if the mech Turks are like the MC simulations used for training the Alpha
Go networks?

What if you stuff the Qt docs into a DL model and using the qt source code as
training data? Could the network produce usable source code based on docs?

~~~
gvb
"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine [random code fragments], will
the right [code] come out?"

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#Passages_from_...](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#Passages_from_the_Life_of_a_Philosopher_\(1864\))

~~~
marmaduke
Tl;dr.

But Babbage’s machine was not différentiable.

------
nkassis
Getting a Theranos type vibe here where they claim some advanced technology
but are just using normal stuff to get the work done. This sounds like a
consulting firm essentially.

------
hevi_jos
I believe what this startup does is impressive:

Train a series of neural networks in order to provide buzzwords at a fast
enough rate to trick actual people with more money that brain to give them
money.

Getting almost 30 millions with just vaporware is always impressive. I won't
be capable of doing anything similar myself.

------
johns
Their web site[0] claims they've already had 60MM in revenue. Curious why that
impressive number pre-A round wasn't included in this article.

[0]: [https://www.engineer.ai/customers](https://www.engineer.ai/customers)

------
jonathankoren
I’m pretty confused by the “AI” part of this. It looks like they built a
library of components and templates, and then have people snap the components
together. Clever, useful to a point, but not AI.

------
tshanmu
lots of red flags - the founders are supposed have exited nivio (the 'first
cloud computing company') at $100m - but the company seems to have
disappeared.

~~~
mpeg
They claim to have raised $21m (from Videocon and AEC partners) in Feb 2012,
but by the end of year the founder(s) claim to have stepped down with $100m
payout (according to engineer.ai) while the company carried on and died in
2014.

I'm not an expert in this, but one of the founders is nephew to Indian
billionaire Venugopal Dhoot (chairman of Videocon); according to Wikipedia and
news sources he's wanted by the police since April 2018 for irregular loans
between his companies accounting for hundreds of millions.

Videocon filed for bankrupcy procedures in June 2018. That connection is very
sketchy.

~~~
rohan404
Beyond Saurabh’s family connection, Engineer.ai has no relationship financial
or otherwise with Videocon or Venugopal Dhoot.

\- Disclaimer, I'm a VP E at Engineer.ai

~~~
mpeg
I was referring to your founders previous company, not to Engineer.ai, didn't
mean to imply there was a connection in the new company.

------
deweller
In my experience, there is a tradeoff between high re-usability and
performance.

Building modules that can interact with any one of hundreds of other modules
usually requires a fair amount of adapter code. This code comes with a
performance penalty.

Maybe their market is ok with lesser performance. But I am highly skeptical
that apps built this way will ever compete with apps built for a single,
specific purpose.

I do hope they can advance the state of the art in some way though, because
software development still feels way more tedious to me than it should be.

~~~
xae342
We need a new type of object that isn’t just a clever pattern that can be
reused but understands how to adapt to the program it’s in, a smart object. I
was hoping that’s what this company was doing with AI but I guess not.

~~~
memebox3f
That's the best idea I have heard this year.

------
cabalamat
> We created Engineer.ai so that everyone can build an idea without learning
> to code

I'll believe that when I see it.

------
chvid
Where is the AI in this?

------
frostyj
No offense but one of the founder's middle name is Dev

~~~
rohan404
You know in all these years that I've worked at Engineer.ai, I never actually
made that connection!

------
bosaisi
I'm surprised no one has mentioned security yet. This seems like a great
strategy for building software systems with plentiful security issues.

~~~
rohan404
Security is definitely a topic we're super concerned about. There's an
interesting tradeoff with using re-usable components - that is, if there's a
security vulnerability in one component, then all apps using it are affected
(for example the notable npm incident
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/12/npm_eslint/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/12/npm_eslint/))!
The flip side is that one can easily detect and patch all applications
affected by that vulnerability. I'd love to have a chat with anyone who has
some thoughts on how to deal with this problem more effectively (email is in
my description).

\- Disclaimer, I'm a VP E at Engineer.ai

------
reviseddamage
I am not an engineer. I have great respect for engineers. Engineers, however,
generally have views of other professions being easily disrupted wholly by AI.
But god forbid, someone suggests that engineers can be taken over by AI, and
we all lose our shit. :thinking: lol.

~~~
opportune
Because when someone who doesn’t understand ML and AI makes that assertion,
they’re just ignorantly speculating in a pointy-haired-boss sort of way.
Whereas an engineer who actually works with AI will have much more realistic
views on what can and can’t be automated in the near futur

------
fuddle
Their video is so cheesy, I could only make it half way through.

------
deepnotderp
They literally have a "VP of blockchain" >.<

~~~
rohan404
Blockchain is something we're currently exploring as a way to augment our
business in order to deal with complex problems like identity management,
royalty payouts, and escrowed payments. Additionally, today we can only work
with developers in devshops; in the future we want to expand into the
freelancer market. Dealing with freelancers at scale is a complicated
proposition, as it's been super hit and miss with a well structured workflow
to manage them. We're hoping we can solve that problem with a mix of
automation and blockchain.

\- Disclaimer, I am the aforementioned VP Blockchain at Engineer.ai

~~~
deepnotderp
Okay that's actually more reasonable, thanks

------
EGreg
Oh yeah, the Grid 2.0 it sounds like.

What exactly is AI about this?

What did the BBC use?

~~~
rohan404
Well there's a pretty big difference between us the Grid - namely that we
don't believe that humans will ever get fully replaced in software
development. Instead we're looking to simply automate the repetitive nature of
the SDLC in order to bring down the cost and time taken for developing bespoke
software. Also, we're super clear that are limitations on the kind of software
that our platform can help us automate. We're specifically interested in
applications that have a high degree of re-use, and we actually turn away
customers who don't fit that model. For example, we'd never build your
enterprise ERP system, though we'd be great at building your HR workflow app,
or your order management system.

Our platform is actually made up of a collection of tools and microservices
including everything from a user story management system (similar to
Jira/PivotalTracker), to the assembler itself which stitches components
together and creates scaffolding for applications (infrastructure and code).
We use AI in a variety of ways throughout this ecosystem (my colleague
@sachmans has touched upon a few of those ways above).

The BBC asked us to build their BBC Click Live app. They were launching Click
in India for the first time ever, and wanted an application to allow for
audience participation. Since their app was relatively simple and was composed
of primarily reusable components, we were able to do it a fraction of the
price and timeline that it would have taken if it was created entirely by a
human team.

\- Disclaimer, I'm a VP E at Engineer.ai

------
claydavisss
The "building block" industry is already a decade+ old - its called AWS. Most
development is already relegated to just doing the masonry between the blocks.

"Building blocks" without operational support is useless. How do you provide
support for some closed "building block" contributed by someone you will never
meet? Open source solves this by making "building blocks" available to
everyone freely. Clouds solve this by selling you a service and you don't
worry about the code.

------
yters
These sorts of companies are the way of the future if humans are indeed
partial halting oracles:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381723](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381723)

Formal proof:

[https://www.am-nat.org/site/law-of-information-non-growth/](https://www.am-
nat.org/site/law-of-information-non-growth/)

Discussion of proof:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18377525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18377525)

~~~
visarga
You mean bullshit companies?

~~~
yters
I mean human+AI companies.

"When a cheap laptop beats the smartest mathematicians at some tasks, but even
a supercomputer with 16,000 CPUs can’t beat a child at others, you can tell
that humans and computers are not just more or less powerful than each other –
they’re categorically different."

\- Peter Thiel, "Zero to One", Chapter 12

Further discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381723](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381723)

------
friendly_chap
Wow, I see a lot of knee-jerk reactions here and I think most of these miss
the point - even if AI helps and writes some of the code, it will only fill
out some gaps at certain levels.

Think about this: we engineers are writers of specs, the same way as product
owners are writers of specs, except they do it at a much higher level.

The high level spec (lets say the top 5%) gets passed down and we fill out the
~middle 50%. What's the rest at the bottom? It's the shoulders of giants we
stand on.

So the same way as we welcome the increasing abstraction levels, from machine
code to C, from C to TypeScript and GraphQL, why don't we welcome this
development too?

It's not probable that we will get automated away anytime soon, and if we are,
well that means AI has truly advanced, certainly something to celebrate, even
if it comes at a financial loss for us.

Perhaps, once we won't get paid anymore to improve ad networks, we will have
the time to do something that actually improves the human condition...

Edit: can the downvoter please elaborate?

~~~
claydavisss
I have no doubt that better app builders will emerge in the future, but I
expect them from cloud providers, not gig agencies. Look at something like
Aurora from AWS - what are you paying for? You're paying partially for the
functionality, but mostly for the operational support (someone else keeps the
SLA intact).

My guess is they are being built with a cloud acquisition in mind.

~~~
friendly_chap
Fair enough, I don't doubt they are trying to bullshit their way to riches, my
comment was in reply to people who say it can't be done because of performance
issues and such.

