Discontinued (verified 2026-10-01)
Yupp shut down on 2026-03-31, less than a year after launch and a $33M raise (TechCrunch, 2026-03-31; Yupp’s own wind-down post at blog.yupp.ai/winddown returned HTTP 429 here). The service is offline; do not rely on the credits, cash-out or leaderboard described below.
Yupp.ai (closed)
by Yupp (co-founders Pankaj Gupta and Gilad Mishne)
Was: a crowdsourced model-comparison chat where users sent one prompt to many AI models, picked the better answer and earned credits that could be cashed out.
Timeline (then → 2026 now)
- 2025: launched with a $33M funding round led by a16z crypto (Chris Dixon) with angels including Jeff Dean, Biz Stone, Evan Sharp and Aravind Srinivas. TechCrunch calls it a Series A, other coverage a seed round: sources conflict on the label, not the amount.
- 2026-03-31: wound down. About 1.3 million users and some labs as paying customers, but insufficient product-market fit. Founders said the model landscape changed and “the future is not just models but agentic systems”; labs preferred expert-sourced evaluation data over broad consumer preference votes (TechCrunch). Some staff joined an unnamed AI company.
What it did (2025 description, historical)
Side-by-side answers from 500+ models; feedback earned credits that could be cashed out (with daily and monthly caps per press coverage); VIBE Score leaderboard of user preferences.
Alternatives
For preference-based or independent comparisons see llm-comparisons-artificialanalysis.ai and other arena-style leaderboards. One commentator noted that chat-only comparison misses how models behave inside agent harnesses such as Claude Code, which commentators cited as a reason for the shutdown.
Sources
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/31/yupp-ai-shuts-down-less-than-a-year-after-raising-33m-from-a16z-cryptos-chris-dixon/ (accessed 2026-10-01)
- https://blog.yupp.ai/winddown/ (HTTP 429; title seen via search; accessed 2026-10-01)
- https://yupp.ai/ (HTTP 429; accessed 2026-10-01)
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/15/the-ai-graveyard-a-running-list-of-projects-and-startups-that-didnt-make-it/ (search result; accessed 2026-10-01)
- https://tooldirectory.ai/tools/yupp-ai (secondary; via search)