Developers could lose their jobs if this automation startup has its way

If you’re a founder desperate to get your idea to market, you can relate to how soporific the development process can be. Assembling a technical team, putting together plans for a mobile site or app, comparing mockups and wireframes, and finally beta testing before a public launch – the process takes several months.

In that time, the opportunity could very well have been lost or usurped by someone else.

Similarly, larger companies focused on improving their existing products usually have little bandwidth for their tech teams to experiment with new ideas. That could stymie innovation – a death knell for companies built to last.

At the end of the day, building new software is a challenging and time-consuming endeavor.

The secret sauce is extensive automation.

Dragonera recognizes this pain. It wants to help founders bring their product to life faster and more efficiently. At the same time, it also aims at boosting innovation in existing firms by trialing new products and services.

It’s an AI-driven platform that’s looking at automating a large part of the software development process. (Correction and update, January 23, 2017: The original story said the “entire” process was automated. This is now fixed, and other details are added below to better explain the situation.)

“Demand for experienced developers largely surpasses the offering […] Dragonera offers a service where customers can deliver an abstract idea and we will deliver a fully functional, go-to-market ready software product,” says co-founder Ido Sadeh Man.

Building blocks

It does so by leveraging machine learning for the product definition and microservices for implementation, he explains. About 70 percent of the product can be automated in this way – at a fraction of the time and cost it would take human developers to achieve the same task.

Ido takes the example of Tinder’s app to outline how the team could have automated a large part of its MVP. Things like signup and login processes, in-app purchases, and other funnel conversion flows could have been optimized by his machine learning tool after scraping public data from the Android and iOS app stores.

The unique features of the app, such as the ability to swipe left and right to indicate preferences, would not have been automated simply because they didn’t exist before in any other consumer app.

He adds that the algorithm wouldn’t just look in the same domain for ideas – if a founder came to Dragonera to build a dating app, the tool would examine data from a broad range of consumer verticals and not just dating. (Update, January 23, 2017: This section related to Tinder is added.)

Microservices are standalone pieces of software that are designed to incorporate specific features. Several of these can be programmed to work together – with the end result that they deliver the full functionality of a product or website.

It’s like building blocks coming together through code and morphing into a larger, powerful entity.

“Our customers don’t need to have a technical team involved – whatever is not handled by our microservices is implemented by our technical network,” explains Ido.

Technical network

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