Accel-backed startups to Anthropic: Divided on building vs buying AI solutions

There are about 800 people as part of Swiggy’s developer team

Food and grocery delivery company Swiggy, AI-based revenue cycle management startup RapidClaims and AI-powered app building platform Rocket are all divided when it comes to buying AI solutions or developing these capabilities in-house.

They were speaking at Anthropic’s first developer day in India, hosted by Accel, one of its investors.

Asked by Prayank Swaroop, Partner, Accel, on the build vs buy proposition, Swiggy’s assistant vice president (AVP) of AI, Vivek Garg said, “for Swiggy, it’s always buy first. We try to build when we see there’s no solution out there in the market or they’re not mature."

“We’re a publicly listed company, we cannot run the risk of hallucinations,” he added.

Swiggy will however build solutions internally when the problem is more Swiggy-centric and it makes sense to solve from the data sets available within the company.

There are about 800 people as part of Swiggy’s developer team, Garg said.

ALSO READ: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to visit India this week; Likely to meet PM Modi, inaugurate Bengaluru office 

Jot Sarup Singh, co-founder of RapidClaims, a company much smaller in scale, said, “for us, it’s more build because we’ve been an AI-native company.”

“Also, building has become infinitely easier because of the advanced models from Claude, ChatGPT and others. Building ensures your core tech capabilities remain strong,” Singh said.

Vishal Virani, co-founder and CEO of Surat-based Rocket, which helps in developing apps and competes with Lovable, Emergent and other platforms

“For us, we build intelligence and USPs and buy scale and speed.”

Virani, Singh and Garg were speaking in a session moderated by Accel’s Swaroop and Anthropic’s Guillaume Princen, Head of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Executives from Anthropic, the artificial intelligence (AI) research company, are on a visit to Bengaluru as it looks to establish a foothold in the world's second-largest Internet market amid intensifying competition from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta.

Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO, Anthropic, was also slated to meet with Prime Minister Modi, visit IT titan Infosys and even open an office in Bengaluru, Moneycontrol had exclusively reported earlier.