Seed Watch: AI Startup Yupp Raises $33 million in seed funding

Author

Ofodile Iloanya
June 20, 2025

Welcome to our weekly edition of Seed Watch- a segment of Market Insyte Digest focused on sharing some of the latest and most intriguing Pre-seed & Seed funding news grabbing the headlines in the startup world.

a16z-backed Yupp stole the headlines this week by raising $33 million in seed funding. However, I was intrigued by how Alta is leveraging agentic AI to accelerate the emerging trend of agentic AI shopping. Find out more about the top 3 deals from this week.

  • Startup Name: Yupp

  • Industry: Artificial Intelligence

  • Region: United States

  • Amount (USD): $33 million

  • The problem it is solving: Yupp improves AI model evaluations by enabling users to compare responses from multiple AI models (like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Llama) and contribute feedback. This feedback loop improves model accuracy and transparency while giving users incentives through crypto rewards.

  • What the Funds Will Be Spent On: The funds will be used to continue building and scaling the Yupp platform, improve its feedback and reward system, integrate additional payment options, and establish Yupp as the default AI evaluation layer using blockchain-based trust mechanisms.

  • Startup Name: Orange Quantum Systems (OrangeQS)

  • Industry: Computing

  • Region: Netherlands

  • Amount (USD): $13.8 million

  • The problem it is solving: As quantum chips grow more complex, the industry faces a major bottleneck in scalable, accurate, and cost-effective testing. Traditional methods are too slow and fragmented to support the pace of innovation. OrangeQS solves this by offering high-speed, standardized, and customizable testing solutions across the quantum chip development value chain.

  • What the Funds Will Be Spent On: The funding will be used to accelerate the development of faster quantum chip testing machines, reduce testing times from weeks to days, and expand OrangeQS’s product suite to support the growing global demand in quantum hardware testing.

  • Startup Name: Alta

  • Industry: Fashion

  • Region: United States

  • Amount (USD): $11 million

  • The problem it is solving: Personalised styling is often reserved for luxury services. Alta is democratising personal styling by using AI to deliver effortless, customised fashion recommendations based on individual taste, lifestyle, and wardrobe.

  • What the Funds Will Be Spent On: The seed funding will be used to advance product development, enhance AI capabilities (including proprietary multimodal models), and scale the team across engineering and operations.