Crowdsourced AI Feedback Startup Yupp.ai Shuts Down Less Than a Year After Launch

Yupp.ai, a crowdsourced AI model-evaluation startup that attracted $33 million in seed funding from some of the most prominent names in Silicon Valley, announced Tuesday it is shutting down, unable to secure strong enough product-market fit before the AI landscape it was built to evaluate shifted beneath it.

Co-founders Pankaj Gupta and Gilad Mishne published a wind-down notice confirming the platform will remain accessible until April 15, 2026, after which new signups and conversations will close permanently. Users can still view and download their chat history until that date. The company, formally incorporated as Ber Sarai Labs Inc., had launched in June 2024.

The platform gave consumers free access to more than 800 AI models, including those from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, returning multiple responses to a single prompt and asking users to rate which performed best and why. That feedback was aggregated into anonymized "preference data" that AI labs paid to access. Yupp said it accumulated 1.3 million users and signed several labs as paying customers, while its VIBE Score leaderboard, short for Vibe Intelligence BEnchmark, ranked models based on user feedback, confidence intervals, latency, and cost. Users earned "Yupp Points" for rating responses, redeemable for up to $50 per month via PayPal, Stripe, or Coinbase, with payments running through crypto rails on the Base Ethereum L2 and Solana blockchains.

None of that traction was enough. In a post on X, Gupta wrote: "The AI model capability landscape has changed dramatically in the last year alone and will continue to change quickly. The future is not just models but agentic systems." The official wind-down post elaborated that as models grow more capable, user workflows are migrating toward systems that connect models to tools, memory, and external services, making crowdsourced evaluation at the chatbot layer "increasingly less critical."

The shutdown is a notable outcome for a company that had raised what was described at the time as "a giant seed round." The $33 million round was led by a16z crypto's Chris Dixon and investment partner Elizabeth Harkavy, who wrote at the time: "We believe crypto can bring transparency and ownership to this murky area of AI." More than 45 angels and small investors joined the round, including Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Coinbase Ventures, and four Stanford University professors: Dan Boneh, Chris Ré, Nick McKeown, and Balaji Prabhakar.

Gupta, who holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford and previously served as a senior ML manager at Twitter from 2009 to 2014 before roles at Google and Coinbase, co-founded the company with Mishne, who heads AI and also met Gupta at Twitter in 2010. Chief Scientist Jimmy Lin, a professor at the University of Waterloo, rounded out the core leadership team.

Gupta confirmed that some employees are joining a "well known" AI company, while others are searching for their next positions. The closure adds to a broader pattern documented by startup closure research firm Simple Closure, which noted that 2025 saw more well-funded startups, including Series A companies, shut down than in prior years, reflecting a market that is increasingly unforgiving for AI products that fail to find their footing before competitive conditions change. For Yupp.ai, the $33 million bet on preference data as a durable business model simply did not survive the speed at which the underlying technology evolved.