Startup profile · funding coverage
Yupp funding, valuation and investors
Crypto-incentivized platform for evaluating and comparing AI models side-by-side.
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Funding, valuation & investors
Answer-first snapshotLatest funding
Seed
$33M · June 2025
Latest known valuation
Not publicly disclosed
Total disclosed equity funding
$33M
Excludes debt, grants, acquisitions, secondaries, and IPO proceeds.
Current status
private
seed · United States
Investors in latest funding
Lead: Andreessen Horowitz
Overview
Yupp (Ber Sarai Labs Inc.) is a consumer platform where users compare responses from multiple AI models side-by-side, provide preference feedback, and earn rewards — creating evaluation data for AI developers. Founded in June 2024 by Pankaj Gupta (ex-Twitter, Coinbase) and Gilad Mishne (ex-Twitter, Google) with chief scientist Jimmy Lin, Yupp launched publicly in June 2025 after six months in stealth. a16z crypto led a $33M seed round with participation from Jeff Dean, Biz Stone, Evan Sharp, Aravind Srinivas, Coinbase Ventures, and 45+ angels.
Why Yupp is interesting
a16z crypto-led $33M seed for onchain model evaluation — turns human preference data into a transparent marketplace AI labs need for post-training.
Product & use cases
Yupp crowdsources model evaluation: users enter prompts, compare outputs from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Llama, and others, then pick winners. Feedback generates digitally signed preference packets; blockchain rails handle rewards and provenance. Public VIBE Score leaderboard ranks models.
- Consumers accessing premium AI models free in exchange for quality feedback
- AI labs sourcing human preference data for RLHF and model benchmarking
- Researchers tracking model performance via Yupp VIBE Score leaderboard
Key facts
- Seed (2025): $33M led by a16z crypto — The Block, a16z crypto
- Founders from Twitter, Google, Coinbase
- Yupp VIBE Score public model leaderboard
Funding history (newest first)
Investors in our directory
Funds linked from Yupp's profile — open a fund page for stage focus and related deal articles.
Competitive landscape
Edge: Crypto incentives + transparent scoring aim to solve evaluation data quality and provenance problems — a16z thesis that blockchains enable auditable reward markets for human feedback.
Model evaluation is bottleneck as labs proliferate. Yupp bets gamified consumer participation beats hiring labelers — but quality control is hard (a16z cites anti-cheating and zk research). Chatbot Arena is free alternative without token economics. $33M seed funds growth before proven enterprise data sales.
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Chatbot Arena (LMSYS) direct
Academic crowdsourced model comparisons; Yupp adds crypto incentives and commercial data packaging.
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Scale AI / Surge adjacent
Human data labeling for AI; Yupp consumer-facing evaluation vs. B2B contractor model.
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OpenAI internal eval incumbent
Labs run private evals; Yupp externalizes and crowdsources.
Notable stories
- Gupta and Mishne worked together at Twitter since 2010 on search and recommendations before founding Yupp to fix AI evaluation transparency (The Block, 2025).
- a16z crypto's Chris Dixon framed Yupp as using crypto as 'trust machine' for auditable human feedback markets (a16z crypto post).
Industries
Market / IPO context
Editorial / static context — not a live quote.
Related funding articles
Venture Capital Tracker pieces that cover Yupp's financing or category context.
FAQs about Yupp
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