John Davey hoped that the hospitality procurement company he founded and still runs, Buyer’s Edge Platform, would benefit from the AI wave. Looking around, the CEO wasn’t happy with his options.
The answer was CollectivIQ, a Boston-based company founded on the Buyers Edge Platform. The company provides users with more accurate answers to their AI queries by simultaneously displaying responses that pull information from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and up to 10 other models.
When new AI tools started hitting the market a few years ago, Davey told TechCrunch he was excited about the possibilities 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 learned that if employees were just using different AI tools, even their own licenses, that could be training on company information,” Davey said. “We could essentially be outpacing our competitors.”
Davey investigates more secure enterprise AI contracts and discovers expensive long-term contracts for large language models that produce inaccurate information and illusions.
“I hated having to decide which employees deserved AI,” he said. “To make matters worse, employees were complaining about illusory and biased answers. In some cases, the answers were actually monotonous and inaccurate, making their way into PowerPoint presentations and cover presentations.”
He challenged his chief technology officer to build something better.
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The result was CollectivIQ. This spinout has created tools to query multiple large language models simultaneously, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI. The software searches for duplicate or disparate information to produce a fused answer that is more accurate than what each LLM would produce on its own.
The company claims that all data related to CollectivIQ prompts is encrypted and deleted after use to maintain enterprise-grade privacy.
“As someone who loves technology, you’re always looking for the best, right?” Davey said. “You always want to have the latest and greatest iPhone, laptop, or tools. I wanted to give my employees the best AI, and there wasn’t really anything that could unify all of my employees into one.”
CollectivIQ began rolling out the software internally for employees in early 2026. The initial response has been great, Davey says. When Davie learned that many of Buyers Edge Platform’s customers had the same confusion and hesitance when it came to adopting AI tools, the company decided to make it publicly available.
This software was built using AI Model’s Enterprise API. CollectivIQ pays the cost of the tokens and customers pay based on usage. Davie hopes this will help the company stand out in the crowded enterprise AI market.
“We hope this is a breath of fresh air for companies that decide they don’t need to commit,” Davey said. “They’re only going to pay for the value they get from it.”
CollectivIQ is fully funded by Davie, who told TechCrunch that he plans to seek outside capital at some point later this year. For Davey, it was great to be back building a new startup some 28 years after starting his current company.
“It feels like a long time ago, but we were at it again and I was very much left in the weeds about LLM and post-training and all sorts of things that I wasn’t trained for,” Davey said. “It’s fun and exciting. I work with software developers to develop products. That’s how I started my full-time company. It’s a lot of fun.”
