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The story behind the story

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Yupp, which raised a $33M seed led by a16z crypto in 2024 for a crowdsourced AI model picker, shuts down, saying it didn't reach strong product-market fit

TechCrunch Julie Bort

Discussion

  • @pankaj Pankaj Gupta on x
    1/ We've made the difficult decision to wind down https://yupp.ai/. The website will be up for another 15 days during which time users can download their chat data. New users won't be able to sign up and existing users won't be able to create new conversations after today.
  • @pankaj Pankaj Gupta on x
    4/ 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. Our
  • @pankaj Pankaj Gupta on x
    6/ I'm deeply thankful to our community of users, team members, customers and investors for supporting us throughout in this journey. Thank you!
  • @pankaj Pankaj Gupta on x
    5/ We have an incredibly talented team and I'm grateful to have worked with them. Some are joining a well-known AI company as a team — others are open to new opportunities. Please reach out at hiring@yupp.ai if you are interested. As for me, I'll be taking a break for now after
  • @synthwavedd Leo on x
    Yupp, a free AI arena, comparison and testing platform competing with @arena, is shutting down on April 15th [image]
  • @pankaj Pankaj Gupta on x
    3/ The AI model capability landscape has changed dramatically in the last year alone and will continue to change quickly. First, models are getting more and more powerful by the day. Second, the way users are adopting AI is changing as chatbots alone are not sufficient for users'
  • @_simonsmith Simon Smith on x
    Yupp, an Arena competitor, is shutting down. One of the key reasons is that evaluating models in a chat interface divorced from harnesses doesn't reflect the reality of how people increasingly use AI models. Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 are very different in a chatbot than in Claude Code
  • @lorepunk @lorepunk on x
    it has really been the most incredible honour working with @pankaj and the whole team at @yupp_ai to tell the story of every AI for everyone. I wish you so very well and i will be here to cheer your next adventures!
  • @mil0theminer Milo Smith on x
    Is it surprising that the name “yupp” failed?
  • @pankaj Pankaj Gupta on x
    2/ We launched Yupp in June 2025 with a two-sided market for AI model evaluation. Our thesis was two-fold: (1) The most robust way to evaluate AI models is during diverse, real-life use by a large number of users, and (2) This can be achieved by building a consumer product
  • @daniloc.xyz @daniloc.xyz on bluesky
    burning through a figure of this scale in a year is very Clinkle-coded. but I do wonder how obvious it was in 2024 that “picking a model” would become “pay for the newest model on the market, confident in the knowledge this is as expensive as that level of performance will ever b…