Engineer.ai launches app building solution, eyes $150 mn revenue

Tech firm Engineer.ai today said it expects to significantly ramp up its revenues to up to USD 150 million in the next five years from its suite of app development solutions.

The company expects this growth to be driven by its 'Builder' solution that allows people -- even those without technical skills -- to get customised apps built for Android, iOS and other platforms.

"Often people want to build apps but many times, they don't have the technical skills or have been misled by developers. We want to offer a model that can help them choose the kind of app they want to build without worrying about the technicalities," Engineer.ai co-founder Sachin Dev Duggal told reporters here.

He added that the cost of service will depend on the level of customisation and the features that the app has. The company also offers services to host and operate the app.

"We expect USD 100-150 million in revenue to come in over the next five years from these services... Last year, our revenue was about USD 14 million," he said.

Drawing parallels with the process of ordering a pizza, Duggal said its "human-assisted artificial intelligence" platform allows users to pick features they want to include on the app, right from building the app to finer additions like Facebook integration.

"Depending on features added like expected delivery time of the app, the cost is shown in real-time bringing in transparency," Duggal said.

Builder has partnered with about 60 companies, including IT firms and outsourcing companies, globally to use their manpower to work on these projects. Engineer.ai already has about 80 such projects active.

"These engineers are located in multiple time zones. We currently have about 20,000 engineers working with us, which we want to scale up to two million engineers by 2020... We also expect to increase the number of projects to about 1,000 per month in the next 12 months," he said.

Duggal added that the company will target these solutions towards small and medium businesses, large enterprises as well as entrepreneurs, adding that in India, its customers can get apps developed for any one platform with up to 10 features for Rs 2.99 lakh.