A startup pitch to bring more reliable AI answers: crowdsourcing chatbots

John Davie wanted Buyers Edge Platform, the hospitality procurement organization he founded and continues to lead, to capitalize on the AI ​​wave. When he looked around, the CEO was not satisfied with the options available.

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

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

“We got a wake-up call about a year ago when we learned that if our employees were just using any different AI tools, or even their license, it could be an exercise on our company information,” Davey said. “We can fundamentally outperform our competitor.”

Diffie researched the most secure institutional AI contracts and discovered expensive long-term contracts for large language models that produce inaccurate and hallucinatory information.

“We hated having to decide which employees were AI-worthy,” he said. “What made matters worse was that employees were complaining about biased and hallucinatory answers. Sometimes they would give us superficial and incorrect answers, which made their way into PowerPoint presentations and cover slides.”

He challenged his CTO to build something better.

The result was CollectivIQ. This release creates a tool that queries several large language models, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI models at the same time. The program searches for overlapping and disparate information to produce a combined answer that is intended to be more accurate than that produced by each LLM alone.

The company claimed that all data included in CollectivIQ claims is encrypted and deleted after use to maintain enterprise-level privacy.

“As someone who loves technology, you’re always looking for the best of the best, right?” Davey said. “You always want the latest and greatest iPhone or laptop or gadget and I wanted to offer my employees the best of AI, but there was really no knowing that would bring it all together in one device.”

CollectivIQ began rolling out the program internally to its employees at the beginning of 2026. Davey said the initial response was strong. Once Davey learned that many Buyers Edge Platform customers were dealing with the same confusion or hesitation about adopting AI tools, the company decided to launch it publicly.

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

“I hope this is a breath of fresh air for companies that see they don’t have to comply,” Davey said. “They will only pay for the value they get from it.”

CollectivIQ is fully funded by Davey, who told TechCrunch that he plans to seek outside capital sometime later this year. For Davey, it was exciting to get back to building a new startup nearly 28 years after launching his current company.

“It’s like we’re back in time, and we’re doing it again and being rowdy and being a mess in the MBA and after training and all kinds of things that I wasn’t trained for,” Davey said. “It’s fun and exciting. I’m collaborating with software developers to build the product, and that’s how I got my main company. It’s a lot of fun.”