[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Grapevine (YC S19) - A company GPT that a...
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Launch HN: Grapevine (YC S19) - A company GPT that actually works
Hi HN! We built Grapevine (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 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/) 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
Author : eambutu
Score : 62 points
Date : 2025-10-06 15:39 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (getgrapevine.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (getgrapevine.ai)
| ebiester wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Our 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%+)
| zwaps wrote:
| Interesting 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 wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| Please 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-...
| maxspero wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Thanks for using it! Any feedback on what could be made better?
| And did you guys try any of the alternatives before using
| Grapevine?
| loudmax wrote:
| Is 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 wrote:
| Well GPT = general purpose transformer
| lsowen wrote:
| Generative pretrained transformer, I think?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-
| trained_transfo...
| ripped_britches wrote:
| It's actually generally prime t-bones
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > I can't speak for other people
|
| Your product is a bot that SPEAKS as an alternative to OTHER
| PEOPLE talking.
|
| > reduce the massive amount of chores and tedium that exist
| in our work days today.
|
| See... is that really a strong opinion? Like look what I
| asked you. How should COMPANIES WORK?
|
| I'm being a little funny about this. I guess my point is
| that, there are a lot of Grapevines, including all the
| companies whose technologies you use. Paul Graham invests in
| all of them, and so he will be fine. But what about YOU? A
| soft and friendly Enterprise Sales tone... like give me a
| strong opinion. People at Google and Meta have better sales
| teams and technology. But they don't have strong opinions. Do
| you get it now?
| Yiin wrote:
| what's your point, you ask for strong opinion without any
| context, what answer do you expect?
| hluska wrote:
| I don't think anyone knows what you're saying.
| dzink wrote:
| The name is way too long for people to type queries using it.
| eambutu wrote:
| Fortunately, Grapevine is just the name of our system, we let
| people white-label their Slack bot when they actually set it up
| :)
| htrp wrote:
| Was a huge fan of gather.town, is this the official notice that
| it's going into maintenance mode?
| eambutu wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Is there a recommended migration path ? or another product
| that you would suggest here?
| eambutu wrote:
| Ah 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 wrote:
| Is this self-hosted? If not, am I to work under the assumption
| that my company's IP is worth ~$0?
| eambutu wrote:
| No 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) 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 wrote:
| Are 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)
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| YCS19 - 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 wrote:
| 2019-2020: We prototyped lots of telepresence ideas, our work
| shown here: https://siemprecollective.com/
|
| 2020-2022: We built 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 :)
| Fischgericht wrote:
| Offer 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 wrote:
| Onyx.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 wrote:
| Just 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.
| rakeshraghu wrote:
| controlcore.io was brought to the market for the same exact
| reason. Not AI Powered, but to control AI and its interactions
| with your Data, APIs,. Applications etc. And yes, we just give
| our service as a self-hostable solution. However is the
| encryption and SOC compliance be, we want our clients to know
| that none of their internal data or interaction transaction
| leave their control.
| eambutu wrote:
| Yep, makes a lot of sense. We architected our system to be easy
| to self-host & open-source in the future for this very reason,
| though we decided to launch with hosted because it's easier to
| improve and iterate.
| Fischgericht wrote:
| Understood. Not my startup, but I would have started the
| other way round.
|
| Businesses that would be willing to pay (a lot) for such a
| benefit often will be very conservative. In Germany the
| majority of medium sized businesses using SAP for example
| still refuse to be moved to SAP's cloud instead of on-
| premise.
|
| C-Level types typically are not worried putting their email
| credentials etc into Outlook cloud and getting hacked this
| way. They are used to "everything is in the cloud". However,
| as soon as you mention, depending on the type of business
| "patents", "sales contacts", "production plans" C's will
| change their mind.
|
| In Germany, where I am originally come from, all of these
| businesses are worried about their trade secrets to end up in
| China, and rightly so.
|
| As self-hosting is very complex you could either make good
| money with consulting (but this means setting up tech teams
| in all target markets around the globe, using actual
| competent humans), or by selling it as a plug&play appliance.
| With that appliance simply being a rack server with a
| suitable GPU installed.
|
| And again, for your business strategy the long-term risk of
| pretty much everyone trying to hack you on a daily basis
| appears too high to me. You might not have on your radar how
| serious industry spionage is. You will definitely have a fake
| utility company worker coming into your offices, trying to
| plug in a USB keylogger into some PC while nobody is looking.
|
| As an example, proven strategy: Find targets internet uplink.
| Cut it. Customer calls ISP for help. You then send a fake ISP
| technician that arrives before the real one does. You put a
| data exfiltration dongle between the modem and the LAN. You
| then fix the cut outdoor line. Customer is happy that you
| have fixed it. Later the actual ISP guy arrives. Everyone
| will be a bit confused that the problem was already fixed,
| but then agree that it's probably just the ISP once again
| having screwed up their resource management. Works pretty
| much every time.
| pmdr wrote:
| ">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 wrote:
| 95% of answers could be accurate. Combined with the 85% that
| are helpful and you have "85% of answers are helpful &
| accurate."
| hiatus wrote:
| Who would intentionally downplay their accuracy in marketing
| materials by conflating the statistic with another?
| eambutu wrote:
| Yep, 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 wrote:
| Why 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 wrote:
| Great 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 wrote:
| Congratulations 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)
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