We're shutting down CrowdPrisma, a bootstrapped applied AI company that was formed two years ago by my friend and I (both ML engineers) to solve free-text survey analysis. A ton of really important information can only be gathered by open-ended surveys and as NLP models were maturing it seemed like a nice and relatively niche market to go after.

I think we had a unique value proposition as our NLP engine was fairly sophisticated and we also integrated its output nicely with other non-text variables (check our demo on the site).

Getting significant business traction was difficult (for reasons which would warrant its own blog post), but now with GPT4, Office Copilot, etc coming online it'll be near impossible.

We learned a ton from the experience and wouldn't change one bit, but I do wonder, how many other companies must be out there like us..

Although it might seem like there's a generative AI startup frenzy going on atm (which is great), I do have the suspicion that in most domains, large tech companies will dominate the market, due to several reasons (another blog post maybe).. Will see.. anyways, interesting times ahead..