One startup’s pitch to provide more reliable AI answers: crowdsource the chatbots

John Davie wanted Buyers Edge Platform, the hospitality procurement enterprise he founded and still leads, to benefit from the AI wave. When he looked around, the CEO wasn’t satisfied with the options. 

The answer was CollectivIQ, a Boston-based company incubated at Buyers Edge Platform that gives users more accurate answers to their AI queries by showing them responses that pull information from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok — and up to 10 other models — all at the same time.

When new AI tools began hitting the market a few years ago, Davie told TechCrunch he was excited about the potential and encouraged his employees to try them out. His optimism was short-lived.

“We had a bit of a wake-up call about a year ago when we learned that if our employees are just using any various AI tools, or even their own license, it could be training on our company information,” Davie said. “We could be essentially edging our competitor.”

Davie looked into more secure enterprise AI contracts and discovered expensive long-term contracts for large language models that produced inaccurate information and hallucinations.

“We hated having to decide which employees deserved AI,” he said. “What really made it worse, employees were complaining about hallucinated, biased answers. Sometimes it was really giving us flat, incorrect answers that made their way into PowerPoint presentations and cover presentations.”

He challenged his chief technology officer to build something better.

The result was CollectivIQ. The spinout created a tool that queries several large language models, including those from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI at the same time. The software searches for overlapping and differing information to produce a fused answer that is meant to be more accurate than those produced by each LLM on its own.

All the data involved with CollectivIQ prompts is encrypted and deleted after use to maintain enterprise-grade privacy, the company claimed.

“As somebody who just loves technology, you’re always looking for the best of the best, right?” Davie said. “You always want to have the latest, greatest iPhone or laptop or tool and I wanted to give my employees the best of the best of AI, but there was really nothing out there that you know would bring them all together into one.”

CollectivIQ started rolling the software out internally to its employees at the beginning of 2026. The initial response was strong, Davie said. Once Davie learned that many of Buyers Edge Platform’s customers were dealing with the same confusion or hesitation around adopting AI tools, the company decided to release it to the public.

The software was built using AI model enterprise APIs. CollectivIQ pays for the token costs and its customers pay by usage, which Davie hopes will help the company stand out in a crowded enterprise AI market.

“I’m hoping that this is a breath of fresh air for companies that see that they are not going to have to be committed,” Davie said. “They’re only going to pay for the value they get out of it.”

CollectivIQ was fully funded by Davie, who told TechCrunch he plans to seek outside capital at some point later this year. For Davie, it’s been fun to be back building a new startup nearly 28 years after he launched his current company.

“It does feel like way back in the day and we are doing it all over again and being scrappy and being very in the weeds on LLMs and post training and all sorts of things I was not trained in,” Davie said. “It’s fun and exciting. I go sit hand and hand with the software developers building the product, that’s how I got my main company, it’s a lot of fun.”