Company’s 43 engineers reportedly maintain a single line of code that adds the word ‘please’ before each API request
SAN FRANCISCO — Nexova AI, the enterprise artificial intelligence startup that raised $80 million in a Series B round last March on the promise of “revolutionizing business intelligence through proprietary large language models,” is now functionally a very expensive intermediary that sends your question to OpenAI’s API and returns the answer in a slightly different font, sources confirmed Tuesday.
“We’ve built something truly special here,” said Nexova CEO and co-founder Brandon Kessler, 29, gesturing at a whiteboard covered in arrows connecting boxes labeled “AI” to other boxes also labeled “AI.” “Our proprietary orchestration layer adds tremendous value. When a customer asks a question, our system reformats it, appends the phrase ‘respond in a professional tone,’ sends it to GPT, and then puts our logo on the response. That’s our moat.”
Nexova’s pitch deck, which was obtained by reporters, describes the company’s technology as “a cutting-edge AI platform leveraging advanced neural architectures,” a phrase that three independent engineers confirmed translates to “we call the OpenAI API.” The deck includes 47 slides, 12 of which feature the word “synergy” and none of which contain the phrase “we call the OpenAI API.”
The company’s 43 full-time engineers, most of whom were hired at salaries exceeding $350,000, spend the majority of their time on what internal Slack messages describe as “prompt optimization,” which one departing engineer clarified means “adding and removing the word ‘please’ from API calls to see if it changes the output. It does not.”
Nexova’s monthly cloud computing bill is reportedly $740,000, of which $680,000 goes directly to OpenAI in API fees. The remaining $60,000 covers the servers that host the company’s custom dashboard, which displays OpenAI’s responses in the color blue instead of the color black.
Investors remain enthusiastic. “What Nexova has built is irreplaceable,” said venture capitalist Morgan Ellis of Sequoia Capital, who led the Series B. “Could a customer just go to ChatGPT directly? Technically, yes. But would they get the same experience? Also yes. But would it be wrapped in an enterprise SaaS product with a $48,000-per-year subscription fee? No. And that’s the value proposition.”
At press time, Nexova had announced a pivot to “agentic AI” and was seeking $200 million in Series C funding.
