The founder of collapsed unicorn Builder.ai has been accused by Indian authorities of receiving siphoned funds from a defunct electronic giant.
Sachin Dev Duggal has been named in a criminal complaint filed by India's Directorate of Enforcement in a New Delhi court. The agency alleges he was “the key beneficiary" of a scheme in which funds from Videocon — an electronics conglomerate that folded in 2018 — were moved through a chain of overseas entities.
Builder.ai, was founded in 2016 by Duggal, with a promise to transform app and website development using AI, eventually raising more than $500m in funding from backers including SoftBank and Microsoft.
Duggal served as CEO and then “chief wizard officer”, until the company collapsed into insolvency in May 2025, following allegations of inflated sales and revenue forecasts.
Both Duggal and the company have previously denied any misreporting of sales.
The prosecution complaint in New Delhi centres on Duggal’s previous startup, cloud computing company Nivio. Authorities claim Videocon “started advancing interest-free loans” to Nivio’s Indian arm with no formal loan agreement in place.
A loan contract was eventually signed in May 2011 — and the following day, an overseas Videocon entity poured SFr 3.7m into Duggal's Swiss company nHoldings SA, despite it being loss-making, at what the agency describe as an “heavily inflated valuation.”
Over the following three years, a further $3.7mn was allegedly routed to nHoldings and to Duggal personally through a five-step offshore chain.
Duggal was first named in relation to this money-laundering probe in March 2024.
Sifted approached Duggal for comment.
A representative for Duggal said they could not comment about the complaint regarding Nivio until it was heard by a judge, the Financial Times reports.
Independently, last year US prosecutors ordered embattled AI startup Builder.ai to hand over internal data, according to reports.
In the weeks before Builder went bust, the FBI reportedly demanded information from the startup, including customer lists and accounting policies. The status of this investigation is unclear.
In September 2025, Sifted reported Duggal briefed investors about a new AI startup. The new company will be called SecondBrain, one source said.
