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Launch HN: Grapevine (YC S19) – A company GPT that actually works
Hi HN! We built Grapevine (https://getgrapevine.ai https://getgrapevine.ai), a knowledge search system for AI agents that connects Slack, GDrive, Notion, codebases, and more. Our first app is a company GPT that significantly outperforms existing alternatives.
Anyone can setup a Grapevine Slack bot and have it respond to and optionally proactively answer questions that require company context. Here’s a demo video with examples: https://youtu.be/_nrfbZzvxU8 https://youtu.be/_nrfbZzvxU8
We built Grapevine because we were interested in a ChatGPT that fully understands your company. We'd tried many of the existing tools (including expensive enterprise ones), but while they were good at answering “what is X team’s Q4 goal,” they weren’t good at the day-to-day questions that actually blocked people.
So, our founders and early engineers created a set of 100+ representative questions, from hard technical questions to company-specific knowledge questions. At first, the state-of-the-art “enterprise search” products were getting about 50% of them correct, and our in-house system was getting 35%. But as we solved details in data processing, search algorithm, and more, we eventually achieved 85%. (For reference, the best human score our founders got was 70%)
It’s changed the way we work: popular engineering channels that have 5+ questions / day are fully answered proactively by AI, and people across departments go to the bot first for bug reports, incidents, and support tickets. Dozens of our beta customers have been consistently surprised by the quality of the answers, too.
Security is obviously super important for a product like this. We will never train on your data. In addition, your data is encrypted at rest, in an isolated database from other customers, and the system is SOC 2 compliant with regularly scheduled pen tests. We built it to Gather’s (https://gather.town/ https://gather.town/) SOC 2 Type II standards - that’s the original virtual office product we launched (and still maintain) out of YC, but we’ve since pivoted to Grapevine.
We put a lot of effort into making Grapevine easy to set up. You can try it now, for free, at https://getgrapevine.ai https://getgrapevine.ai
- gusstevens 1y ago[dead]
- ebiester 1y agoI've seen Gleam and Onyx, and I think the real problem is that there is a lot of garbage coming in. If you want to solve the problem, you need to find a way to clean the information coming in. And if you've cleaned the information coming in, you have a lower need to have an LLM answer the question.
- eambutu 1y agoOur experience, especially with the most recent reasoning models, is that the LLM's are a lot better now at sifting through the garbage. So if you last gave these products a try more than a month ago, I would try them again. (Additionally, there are a lot of details that do make a big difference in data processing / search algo too, which have taken our own internal accuracy on hard questions from 30% => 80%+)
- arahman4710 1y ago[dead]
- zwaps 1y agoInteresting to see this now launching, when most companies have their own customGPT solution and MCP makes headway towards decoupling the frontend layer. Data seems to be stored outside of the customers control, so this will be a difficult sell for many companies. What type of businesses are you targeting?
- eambutu 1y agoIn terms of what businesses we're targeting: we wanted to provide either 1.) a turnkey solution for a company GPT for all the people who don't have it yet, or 2.) a higher quality company GPT for people who do have an internal solution. Our sense is that ~70% knowledge companies at large still don't have a custom GPT yet, and that of the people who do, our system can be more performant because we're spending more effort than their internal team is. There's a lot of details we've solved on data ingestion and search algo that improved our accuracy dramatically, and things breadth of data connectors is the kind of thing that is expensive for an internal team but worth it if you're providing the service at large. Not sure what you mean by "data seems to be stored outside of the customers control," but fortunately I think many SaaS apps that were trying to lock down customer data from themselves are walking that back a little bit.
- Ucalegon 1y agoPlease look into the Zero Data Retention policies of the subprocessors that you are using. For example, Open AI does not include files as falling under their ZDR [1], thus utilizing OAI as an LLM solution inherently adds unnecessary risk of data exposure that many enterprise clients do no want to onboard. Also, you have to think about those companies obligation to their clients/customers when it comes to data security, along with the risk of IP being exposed to 3rd party systems that they do not have control over, when they make their decisions when it comes to utilizing various business solutions. [1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/your-data#zero-data-retention https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/your-data#zero-data-...
- maxspero 1y agoI've been using Grapevine at my company for the last couple weeks. One of the coolest features is that it proactively answers questions (with citations!). Not everyone thinks to tag the bot but it often surfaces the relevant answer and document and saves everyone some time.
- eambutu 1y agoThanks for using it! Any feedback on what could be made better? And did you guys try any of the alternatives before using Grapevine?
- teleforce 1y ago>One of the coolest features is that it proactively answers questions (with citations!). It's cool feature but is it not the given and default feature of any RAG based LLM to provide citations based on the documents chunking mechanism?
- loudmax 1y agoIs the "ChatGPT" brand name becoming a generic term, like Baid-Aid or Kleenex? There is the ChatGPT product, operated by OpenAI, Inc, which you can access via their web site or their API. OpenAI does publish gpt-oss as an open-weights model. I suppose you could argue that gpt-oss is "a ChatGPT," though I'd normally think of it as "a large language model." Much like Claude, DeepSeek, Qwen and so on are other large language models.
- Perz1val 1y agoWell GPT = general purpose transformer
- lsowen 1y agoGenerative pretrained transformer, I think? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transformer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transfo...
- ripped_britches 1y agoIt’s actually generally prime t-bones
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- doctorpangloss 1y ago> the day-to-day questions that actually blocked people do you have a very strong opinion about how companies should work? "No" Okay, does Dario Amodei? He thinks more than half the workforce should "just" be replaced. That's a strong opinion! Do you see what I am saying?
- eambutu 1y agoI can't speak for other people, but our strong opinion about how companies should work is to reduce the massive amount of chores and tedium that exist in our work days today. With the company GPT, we want to tackle things like: 1.) having to answer a repeated question from a colleague, 2.) answering questions to coworkers that are purely informational, and eventually 3.) things like standup updates, written updates to leadership on status, etc. I think human interaction at work is one of the most valuable experiences if you're lucky enough to have good colleagues and interesting work. But I think they should almost entirely be around creativity, decision-making, debate, etc. rather than sharing information that exists elsewhere.
- doctorpangloss 1y ago[flagged]
- Yiin 1y agowhat's your point, you ask for strong opinion without any context, what answer do you expect?
- hluska 1y agoI don’t think anyone knows what you’re saying.
- dzink 1y agoThe name is way too long for people to type queries using it.
- eambutu 1y agoFortunately, Grapevine is just the name of our system, we let people white-label their Slack bot when they actually set it up :)
- htrp 1y agoWas a huge fan of gather.town, is this the official notice that it's going into maintenance mode?
- eambutu 1y agoThe Gather work product is unfortunately going into maintenance mode. We still have a strong team working on the core AV and performance, and the business is very decent and more than supports that team (and we still use the Gather product heavily ourselves). However, it didn't reach the growth trajectory we needed, so a majority of the company will be working on Grapevine + new products instead.
- stuartjohnson12 1y agoThis is sad to hear. We loved Gather but the technical issues stacked up and we made the choice to kill it around 2 weeks ago. We've still been searching for a proper replacement for go-karting. Our team greatly enjoyed that little mini game. A thought for any lurking vibe-coders.
- htrp 1y agoIs there a recommended migration path ? or another product that you would suggest here?
- eambutu 1y agoAh to be clear, the team is staffed well enough on Gather that the experience will be equal, if not better, than what you've been using already. So we haven't been telling customers to migrate (and unfortunately, there aren't many good alternative products right now).
- cowpig 1y agoIs this self-hosted? If not, am I to work under the assumption that my company's IP is worth ~$0?
- eambutu 1y agoNo self-hosted version yet. You would need to trust us in the same way you trust your other SaaS apps that host company IP (e.g. Slack, Notion, Github, etc.) I get that's a big ask from a startup. If it helps, we are a company that's been around for 4+ years and have built a work tool (https://gather.town https://gather.town) used for 100k+ people for their daily work, Sequoia-backed, are SOC II certified, and go way beyond that for the security considerations for this product.
- cowpig 1y agoAre slack/github/notion dumping company data into an unknown set of LLM APIs under the hood? (My company uses Zulip/Gitea/Affine for data sovereignty reasons, but this kind of thing seems worse)
- anshumankmr 1y agoNotion is using Claude so yes?
- echelon 1y agoBuild the on-prem thing. Companies will be much more trusting.
- bluelightning2k 1y agoYCS19 - so 6 years. Obviously you did well enough to survive. Interesting that the pivot is something so basic after all this time. Kind of interested in the story there.
- eambutu 1y ago2019-2020: We prototyped lots of telepresence ideas, our work shown here: https://siemprecollective.com/ https://siemprecollective.com/ 2020-2022: We built https://gather.town https://gather.town, which during COVID blew up across every use-case possible: conferences, birthday parties, weddings, universities. It was a good business during COVID but eventually started to shrink. 2022-2025: We built Gather for remote workers, which was a long grind into in Audio/Video, performance, and making a game-interface that was good for work but replicated the parts of in-person work people enjoyed. It's a decent business, but didn't match our ambitions with how we wanted to change work for the better. 2025+: We have lots of ideas for how we can make work a lot better with AI. The general theme is, "can we make work as fun as a video game?" Idea being: video games are super similar to work at its core, and AI can both 1.) dramatically change how people need to spend their days, and 2.) help you "game design" someone's work day. The Grapevine system is the first tablestakes layer people need to have for us to build the products we're excited about. Surprisingly, "company context" was not as good as we thought despite it being such an obvious, big business opportunity. So while I agree it's "basic," it does seem necessary, and is also not the full-scale of what we want to achieve still :)
- bluelightning2k 1y agoThanks. Makes sense. Good luck with the pivot
- Fischgericht 1y agoOffer self-hosted and I would buy. Do not assume that companies are willing to put ALL of their intellectual property into your hands. Even if you would not be some startup where any sysadmin could steal and sell my data any time without you even noticing it, you will get hacked just like everyone else that stores interesting data. The data you have access to is absolutely perfect for the global data blackmailing gangs. As soon as you are successful, you will have every black hat hacker and their dog knocking on your doors.
- jychang 1y agoOnyx.app has a self hosted option. I just did the docker setup yesterday. It’s not a great home user option imo but seems like it’s functional for enterprise.
- Fischgericht 1y agoJust had a quick look - while they have that self-hosting option, they still assume you will use a cloud LLM. I started digging because I got confused of them not mentioning any GPU when it comes to resource requirements. There is some documentation on using it fully self-hosted including the LLM, but the emphasis here is on "some". To be clear: I am looking at this from a CEO perspective, not a "I will play with it in my spare time" nerd one.
- jxmesth 1y agoGoing off on a tangent here but, does anyone have a good guide on how to set up an AI/LLM/GPT chatbot/agent for a small business? Not looking to spend millions but a couple thousand are alright. TIA
- pmdr 1y ago">85% of answers are helpful & accurate" People can usually tell if an answer isn't helpful, but not always that it isn't accurate. Depending on the context, 85% accurate might not be good enough.
- jagged-chisel 1y ago95% of answers could be accurate. Combined with the 85% that are helpful and you have “85% of answers are helpful & accurate.”
- hiatus 1y agoWho would intentionally downplay their accuracy in marketing materials by conflating the statistic with another?
- lelanthran 1y ago>95% of answers could be accurate. Combined with the 85% that are helpful and you have “85% of answers are helpful & accurate.” Instead of using the lower bound, wouldn't it make more sense to say "85% of the 95% accurate answers are helpful"? Or perhaps "95% of the 85% helpful answers are accurate"? In both cases, the number for "answers that are both helpful and accurate" is lower than 85%.
- eambutu 1y agoYep, the other commenter is right--85% is helpful AND accurate. I'd love for you to give it a try and see if 85% is not good enough though. There's always more to push on quality and the more real feedback we get the better we can prioritize what people need.
- mikpanko 1y agoWhy do you think Glean and other top company GPT startups who are doing this for longer and have more resources cannot get this level of performance (helpful and accurate)? What makes your approach different and not easy to replicate?
- eambutu 1y agoGreat question. We are actually surprised more than anything that existing products aren't better. Other companies' algo work DID get disrupted by reasoning models, because newer models don't care about what the top 3 search results are, they're really great at reading hundreds of documents and picking up signal from noise. I can't speculate exactly on the work that other companies have done, but my guess is we were way more focused on the type of questions people actually ask to each other. We know there's still a lot more you can do to continue to improve it, and so it's up to other folks if they do it too. Lastly, a few ways we want to be distinguished from all the other offerings are: 1) super easy to setup, 2.) very developer friendly
- BrandiATMuhkuh 1y agoCongratulations on the launch. I was recently trying to tackle the same problem (@howie.systems). The hardest 2 problems we had to face were ACL and large files (and large volumes). How did you solve the ACL part? I worked with a customer that had 200k pdf/images/dwg files on SharePoint and other 1M on samba. It took like a week to sync it all and keep tabs on the access rights of each employee. How did you solve unpredictable large files: a pdf 2000pages, maybe some A0 in the mix. Or some 4GB power point presentations? PS: great fan of gather. PPS: say hi to Clinton from me (amy.app) if he is still around. He was our mentor back in New Zealand at the flux accelerator (2016)
- petesergeant 1y ago> How did you solve the ACL part? Forgive my cynicism, but $2 says they simply didn’t.
- sukdeeppratel 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mickeyben 1y agoNo pricing?
- anshumankmr 1y agoThis might be confused with the other Grapevine which an dunk-on-your-employer app which also has some other AI stuff like an AI recruiter amongst other things.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoWhat exactly have you been working on since 2019? I'm guessing you entered YC with a different idea/pitch then the one you put here, as ChatGPT didn't exist back then, what was the original idea and how did it morph into what you have today?
- dventimisp 1y agoeambutu, how does this compare to Notion Enterprise Search? https://www.notion.com/product/enterprise-search https://www.notion.com/product/enterprise-search