Yupp shuts down after raising $33M from a16z crypto’s Chris Dixon

Sometimes an apparently good idea, a big raise from a big-name VC, and a sea of well-connected angel investors is not enough.

Less than a year after launching, Yupp is closing its business, co-founders Pankaj Gupta and Gilad Mishne announced on Tuesday.

Yupp offered a crowdsourced AI model-picking service. It allowed consumers to test and compare results from a supply of 800 AI models for free, including the state-of-the-art ones from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Yupp would return multiple replies from the prompt request, including information or images, and users would offer feedback on which models worked best for them and why.

The idea was to generate anonymized data on what people actually need from AI that the model makers would then pay for. Yupp said it signed up 1.3 million users and collected millions of preferences every month. It even had a leaderboard. The company said it also had a few AI labs as customers.

But alas, it “didn’t reach a strong enough product-market fit” to survive, in part because AI models improved by such leaps and bounds these past few months, the founders said.

While labs are paying big bucks for feedback, the current model — pioneered by companies like Scale AI and Mercor — is to hire specialty experts, like PhDs, and tuck them into the reinforcement learning loop.

On top of that, Silicon Valley is already looking 10 miles down the road, when AI is built for, and being used by, other AIs. Model makers might want some consumer feedback now, but they are largely building for the day when agents, not humans, rule the online world.

“The AI model capability landscape has changed dramatically in the last year alone and will continue to change quickly,” Gupta, Yupp’s CEO, wrote in a post on X about the plans to shutter. “The future is not just models but agentic systems.”

Yupp raised a $33 million seed round in 2024 led by a16z crypto’s Chris Dixon, a giant seed round for its day. In addition, Yupp raised checks from more than 45 angels and small investors, it said. This included luminaries like Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean; Twitter co-founder Biz Stone; Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp; and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas.

Gupta said some of Yupp’s employees are joining a “well-known” AI company, and others are looking for their next gig. Yupp did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.