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Dragonera’s team. Photo credit: Publicity.

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 automating the entire software development process.

“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.

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.

The Tel Aviv-headquartered startup recently locked in US$3 million to scale operations. The cash came from Singulariteam – the same guys behind Solarin, a US$14,000 smartphone. Ido doesn’t disclose valuation figures, but says they want to grow fast – and foresees that the existing team of 11 will triple by the end of the year.

Dragonera’s SaaS dashboard. Photo credit: Publicity.

You’re in control

Dragonera functions as an interactive SaaS dashboard – founders and execs control the design and user interface of the product. They’ll be allowed to monitor progress continually and talk to an account manager online whenever they’d like.

Essentially, you still have a tech team and are in the driving seat of the iterative process, but are saved the associated cost and overheads.

“We’re trying to provide a near in-house experience,” says Ido.

The team’s already worked with industry players in real estate who engaged them to build a new app. Ido says he can’t give details due to confidentiality clauses – but describes the founders as leading industry professionals without any product, user experience, or technical backgrounds.

Dragonera’s AI coders delivered a fully functional product within 40 days and for less than US$40,000. Ido claims that the alternative solution for the businessmen – either through hiring technical talent or engaging an outsourcing company – would have cost them 80 percent more in terms of both time and money.

The secret sauce, he adds, is all extensive automation.

The team behind Dragonera has tons of experience in machine learning and service-oriented architecture. Ido believes there’s a huge opportunity – he points to the US$280 billion software outsourcing industry and hints that it’s time for it to be disrupted.

“This market is dominated by traditional giants, mostly focusing on reselling time and material (i.e. engaging a developer for X and reselling his work for 2X). We believe this market is one of those where the combination of machine learning automation along with sharing economy solutions will change the nature and scale,” says Ido.

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