When we started covering Builder.ai a few years ago, the startup was tapping into a new wave of businesses wanting their own native apps. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal in 2019, the company was relying mostly on human engineers who were merely directed by an AI platform in a more efficient manner that previous generations of work-allocation software. In fact, the company was sued in 2019 by its chief business officer, Robert Holdheim, who claimed the company had exaggerated its AI abilities to gain funding. Whatever the case, the startup has now assembled a large number of software tools to gradually automate large parts of software and app building, hence the new funding from new investors. Established in 2016 originally as Engineer.ai, Builder.ai developed what it called an “AI-powered low-code/no-code app development platform. Although Builder.ai may not have been using AI to assemble the direct code and instead using remote-working engineers to build the apps (something which it actually never denied in my experience), it was clearly using machine learning to speed up and automate large swathes of both customer interaction and engineer assignments. Builder.ai says it has now increased its revenue by over 300% and the capital raised will be further invested in the AI and automation capabilities of its low-code/no-code platform.This will include a new conversational AI, named “Natasha™” as a self-service bot.In a statement, Sachin Dev Duggal, Co-Founder of Builder.ai, said: “Our choice of investor for this round was very deliberate; we wanted someone who had deep insight and immense courage to let us think and do differently. By truly democratizing access to complex software, Builder.ai is set to disrupt the core of how applications are built.”Klaus Hommels, Founder and Chairman, Lakestar, added: “Builder.ai is one of those rare companies that has entered a brand new category; with technology that has a disruptive impact to the world around us; especially as companies continue the move to being digital-first.