John Davie wanted his company, Buyers Edge Platform, to benefit from the AI wave. As the founder and CEO of the hospitality procurement enterprise, he looked at the available options but was not satisfied. His solution was to create CollectivIQ, a Boston-based company incubated at Buyers Edge Platform. This tool provides users with more accurate answers to AI queries by showing responses that pull information from multiple models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude—and up to ten others—all at the same time.
When new AI tools first emerged, Davie was excited about their potential and encouraged his employees to experiment. However, his optimism quickly faded. About a year ago, the company had a wake-up call. They realized that if employees used various AI tools or even their own licenses, those tools could be training on company information, potentially giving an edge to competitors.
Davie then explored more secure enterprise AI contracts. He found them to be expensive long-term commitments for large language models that often produced inaccurate information and hallucinations. He disliked the idea of deciding which employees deserved access to AI. To make matters worse, employees complained about receiving biased or hallucinated answers. Sometimes the AI provided flatly incorrect information that even made its way into important presentations.
He challenged his chief technology officer to build something better. The result was CollectivIQ. This spinout created a tool that queries several large language models from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI simultaneously. The software searches for overlapping and differing information to produce a fused answer designed to be more accurate than any single model could provide on its own.
The company claims all data involved with CollectivIQ prompts is encrypted and deleted after use to maintain enterprise-grade privacy. Davie, who loves technology, explained that he always wants the best tools for his employees, but nothing existed that brought all the best AI models together into one place.
CollectivIQ began rolling out the software internally to its employees at the start of 2026. The initial response was strong. Once Davie learned that many of Buyers Edge Platform’s customers faced similar confusion or hesitation around adopting AI, the company decided to release the tool to the public.
The software was built using AI model enterprise APIs. CollectivIQ covers the token costs and charges its customers based on usage, a model Davie hopes will help the company stand out in the crowded enterprise AI market by allowing customers to pay only for the value they receive.
CollectivIQ was fully funded by Davie, though he plans to seek outside capital later this year. For him, it has been fun to return to building a new startup nearly 28 years after launching his current company. He describes the experience as scrappy and immersive, working hand-in-hand with software developers on details like LLMs and post-training—areas he was not originally trained in. He finds the process exciting and reminiscent of how he built his main company.