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Launch HN: Grapevine (YC S19) – A company GPT that actually works (getgrapevine.ai)

73 points by eambutu ↗ HN
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

21 comments

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ebiester
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.
zwaps
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?

maxspero
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.
loudmax
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.

doctorpangloss
> 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?

dzink
The name is way too long for people to type queries using it.
htrp
Was a huge fan of gather.town, is this the official notice that it's going into maintenance mode?
cowpig
Is this self-hosted? If not, am I to work under the assumption that my company's IP is worth ~$0?
bluelightning2k
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.
Fischgericht
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.

pmdr
">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.

mikpanko
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?
BrandiATMuhkuh
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)

petesergeant
> How did you solve the ACL part?

Forgive my cynicism, but $2 says they simply didn’t.

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anshumankmr
This 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
What 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?