> For all those people asking why the VCs did not catch this: what sort of diligence would you do?
I mean, it claims to do 80% of the work to create an app in an hour. I'd have them demonstrate that - "OK, have it generate one for this random concept I just came up with" - and provide the resulting code for an independent developer to look at.
If the answer is "that'll take a week", there's your tell.
> I mean, it claims to do 80% of the work to create an app in an hour
No, it claims that it will do that, not that it does do that. If it was “does”, yes, the VC would be able to verify it. If it is “will”—and that's what they are seeking funding to build out—its a lot harder to verify.
You're more or less correct in your understanding, we're trying to get to 80%, and are certainly not there yet.
The other thing to keep in mind is that there's a lot more than goes into developing software than just code.
We've already been able to automate problems such as selecting the optimal creators (developers, QAs, designers) for a given project from our capacity network, the ability to price out and estimate timelines for a project (something that takes our competitors 2-3 weeks), onboard and evaluate engineers on our platform, predict, arbitrage and scale cloud infrastructure for our client's projects, along with a bunch of other areas.
There's definitely a long way for us to go, however we have been able to show proven success on these problem areas already.
but how is the accuracy of your quicker timeline estimates? being faster isnt always the only important factor.
however i disagree with your third paragraph, you have not solved any problems in the problem area you are raising money for, which is AI created software. best i can tell, based on your commentation you are just streamlining onboarding, hiring and estimating. No offense, but none of this has anything to do with AI, IMO. Just a glorified project management and outsourcing company at this point.
If it claims it will do that, it sounds like they should be raising an Angel or Seed round, not a massive A round.
They raised $29.5 million in a Series A round. That sounds like find-product-market-fit money, possibly a bit of growth money -- NOT pre-product money. You dont need to raise $30M to go from pre-product to product.
The financiers were Swiss VC firm Lakestar and Singapore’s Jungle Ventures led the financing and participation from Softbank’s DeepCore. I'm surprised this would get past them.
But, as I understand the claim, it doesn't do 80% of the work but are 80% of the way there. Even if you can easily see that they are actually 10% of the way there, and this is just optimism/hyperbole, you may think the approach has merit.
> But, as I understand the claim, it doesn't do 80% of the work but are 80% of the way there.
No, they claim both that it will do 80% of the work to build the app within an hour and that they are 80% done with the app. (Both claims being 80% makes it easy to mistake them for a single claim, but both are stated separately in the article.)
Tangentially, the two 80% claims together seem to me to pretty forcefully bring to mind the 80/20 rule even before considering whether the claims are completely fraudulent.
I mean, it claims to do 80% of the work to create an app in an hour. I'd have them demonstrate that - "OK, have it generate one for this random concept I just came up with" - and provide the resulting code for an independent developer to look at.
If the answer is "that'll take a week", there's your tell.