American startup Nate, which uses artificial intelligence to automate purchases, was suspected of using employees from the Philippines to manually process transactions. Written by This Knowledge.

According to two people familiar with the company’s technology, the share of manually executed transactions in 2021 ranged from 60% to 100%. Another whistleblower said he hid from investors the fact that during the fundraising process, the startup used workers to outsource.

According to the report, the software has encountered blockers for bots used by online merchants to prevent automated purchases. Because of them, most of the orders had to be placed manually. In some cases, requests were delayed for several hours.

Journalists also found that by the end of 2021, the number of transactions made through the service had dropped to 100 per day. To that end, Nate launched a social media marketing campaign, giving new users a $50 coupon to purchase at select stores. This made it possible to increase the number of daily transactions to 10,000.

It later turned out that users created multiple accounts with the same payment details but different emails. After removing the duplicates, the daily transaction count dropped to 75-100 per day.

A spokesperson for Nate called the numbers “false” and said the allegations questioning the patented technology were “baseless”.

The startup was founded in October 2018. The Nate app automatically fills in customer information for $1 per transaction, saving you time when shopping from different online stores.

In June 2021, the company raised $38 million in the Series A round, with a total investment of approximately $50 million.

Recall that in May Singapore authorities reported the growing popularity of assistive robots used by local businesses during the migration crisis.

In January, researchers said that by 2040, widespread automation in businesses will leave 12 million Europeans unemployed.

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