John Davie wanted Buyers Edge Platform, the hospitality procurement company 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 by the Buyers Edge Platform. The company provides users with more accurate answers to AI queries by showing responses that pull information from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and up to 10 other models simultaneously.
When new AI tools started hitting the market a few years ago, Davie told TechCrunch he was excited about their potential and encouraged his employees to try them out. His optimism did not last long.
“About a year ago, we had a bit of a wake-up call when we realized that if our employees were using various AI tools or our own licenses, they might be training on company information,” Davie said. “We can essentially have an advantage over our competitors.”
Davie investigated safer enterprise AI contracts and discovered expensive, long-term contracts for large language models that generated inaccurate information and hallucinations.
“We hated having to decide which employees were eligible for AI,” he said. “What was worse was that employees were complaining about hallucinatory and biased answers, sometimes even giving dry and incorrect answers that were actually embedded in PowerPoint presentations and cover presentations.”
He asked his Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to make it better.
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The result was CollectivIQ. The spinout created a tool to query multiple large-scale language models simultaneously, including models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI. The software searches for redundant or different information and produces a fused answer that is more accurate than the answers each LLM generated on its own.
All data associated with CollectivIQ prompts is encrypted and deleted after use to maintain enterprise-grade privacy, the company claimed.
“As someone who loves technology, you’re always looking for the best of the best, right?” Davey said. “You always want to have the latest and greatest iPhone or laptop or tool, and I wanted to provide the best AI to my employees, but there was really no way to bring them together.”
CollectivIQ will begin rolling out the software internally to employees in early 2026. The initial response was strong, Davie said. When Davie realized that many of Buyers Edge Platform’s customers were experiencing the same confusion or hesitation about adopting AI tools, he decided to make it public.
The software is built using the AI Model Enterprise API. CollectivIQ pays for tokens and customers pay based on usage. Davie hopes this will help the company stand out in the crowded enterprise AI market.
“I’m hoping this will be a breath of fresh air for businesses realizing they don’t have to make a commitment,” Davie said. “They will only pay for the value they get out of it.”
CollectivIQ is fully funded by Davie, who told TechCrunch that he plans to seek external capital at some point later this year. For Davie, it’s been fun getting back to building a new startup almost 28 years after founding his current company.
“It feels like old times and we’re scrappy and in the weeds doing it all over again with LLMs and post-training and all kinds of things I wasn’t trained for,” Davie said. “It’s fun and exciting. I sit and work with software developers who build products. That’s how I got my major company. It’s really fun.”
