A16z-backed Yupp AI shuts down operations; here is why

Yupp.ai is winding down its operations after failing to achieve a strong product-market fit, founder Pankaj Gupta said in a post on X. The online platform will remain accessible until April 15, allowing existing users to view chat history and download their data.

Launched for public use last June, the AI startup was a free-to-use platform that provided users with response options generated by over 500 generative AI models, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and models from Mistral. In addition to accessing multiple outputs, users could earn credits by providing feedback on their preferred responses.

"I have founded startups before and have learned that it's best to acknowledge what's not working early versus continue on a path that's not promising. As a result, we've made the difficult decision to wind down the company and return the remaining money to our investors," Gupta wrote.


Gupta, who was the CEO, founded the company with former Google employee Gilad Mishne. He previously served as advisor and VP at Coinbase. In his post, Gupta stated that he would now be taking a two-year break.

Yupp raised $33 million in a seed funding round last June from 45 investors, including a16z crypto (the crypto-investment arm of Andreessen Horowitz), Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone, Pinterest cofounder Evan Sharp, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Cred CEO Kunal Shah, and Coinbase Ventures. The company will return the remaining funds to investors.

Insufficient traction



Gupta stated that the startup had aimed to create a two-sided marketplace for AI model evaluation by giving users access to multiple AI models and using their real-world interactions to help AI labs assess performance.

Despite onboarding over 1.3 million users and securing several AI labs as paying customers, the company concluded that its core offering did not gain sufficient traction.

Gupta stated that this was primarily because of the changing market environment, and more particularly, the rise of agentic systems. "The future is not just models but agentic systems. This consists of models plugged into hundreds of real-world tools and subsystems, such as memory and external services, to make the best use of their powerful reasoning and tool-calling capabilities," he said.

This, he claimed, makes survival and monetary viability for crowdsourced model evaluation tools like Yupp difficult.

Gupta said that some team members would transition to roles at another AI company, while others are exploring new opportunities. He did not disclose the name of the company.