We replicated 80% of a €2.8B acquisition's core features to prove a point about where real competitive value lives.
In 2024, a European company acquired Rinde — a Chilean expense management platform — for €2.8 billion. The question was simple: if the product is the moat, how long would it actually take to rebuild it from scratch using modern AI-assisted development? We decided to find out.
Starting from a blank canvas, we built Rinde YNK — a fully functional expense management platform. AI-assisted coding, rapid prototyping, and deep domain knowledge compressed what would traditionally take months into a single work week. Receipt scanning, approval workflows, reporting dashboards, multi-currency support — the core feature set that enterprises pay for.
The finished product replicated approximately 80% of Rinde's core functionality. The LinkedIn post documenting the experiment generated 76 reactions and 27 comments — sparking a conversation about what truly constitutes a competitive moat in the age of AI.
“Software is no longer the moat. Processes, people, cash flow, brand, reliability, and operational scalability — that's where real value lives. The technology is the easy part now.”