In a bold move to reshape how artificial intelligence models are assessed and trusted, AI and Web3 startup Yupp has announced a $33 million seed funding round.
The round was led by a16z Crypto, the blockchain investment arm of Andreessen Horowitz, with support from Coinbase Ventures and over 45 notable angel investors from the tech and AI world.
Among those backing Yupp are Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist at Google; Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter; Evan Sharp, co-founder of Pinterest; Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI; and Kunal Shah, founder of CRED. The strong investor interest signals growing demand for more transparent, user-driven evaluation methods for large language models (LLMs).
A New Way to Benchmark AI
Founded by Pankaj Gupta and Gilad Mishne, Yupp (operating under the name Ber Sarai Labs Inc.) is building a decentralized platform where users can compare and vote on outputs from more than 500 AI models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, xAI’s Grok, Meta’s Llama, and many others. Users are shown side by side responses to a prompt and asked to choose the best one.
Their feedback not only helps rank the models but also earns them Yupp Credits, a tokenized point system that can be redeemed for additional model usage or exchanged for cryptocurrency.
This creates a feedback loop where users are incentivized to provide high-quality judgments, and AI companies receive real, human-rated performance data to improve their systems.
Blockchain Backed Trust
Unlike traditional AI benchmarks managed internally by developers or researchers, Yupp stores all feedback and rankings on the blockchain. This ensures that evaluations are transparent, auditable, and tamper-proof.
At the core of the platform is the VIBE system short for Vibe Intelligence Benchmark a real time leaderboard that ranks AI models based on thousands of crowd sourced votes.
It offers a constantly updating, community driven standard for AI performance that goes beyond closed tests or proprietary metrics.
The Case for Decentralized AI Governance
The AI industry is experiencing rapid growth, but it still lacks trusted, independent tools for comparing model quality across vendors.
With increasing competition and a flood of new LLMs entering the market, users and developers alike need better ways to determine which models are most useful, accurate, and safe.
By combining crypto incentives with AI benchmarking, Yupp hopes to introduce a neutral and scalable solution to the problem one that rewards transparency, fairness, and collective intelligence.
What’s Next for Yupp?
Currently in private beta, Yupp plans to expand user access in the coming months and introduce more features.
The company also hinted at the potential launch of a native token, which could further deepen its integration into the Web3 ecosystem.
Strategic partnerships, possible integrations with payment providers like Stripe, PayPal, or Coinbase, and additional funding rounds may follow as the platform gains traction.
A Promising Step Toward Open AI Evaluation
Yupp’s emergence marks a new chapter in the convergence of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology.
With strong financial backing and a unique approach to community powered evaluation, Yupp positions itself at the forefront of the movement toward decentralized, trustworthy AI benchmarking.
As the public’s demand for fair, unbiased, and accessible AI tools continues to grow, Yupp may be one of the key platforms shaping the future of how we judge, trust, and interact with artificial intelligence.
