Yelp

Liquid AI

Yelp

Local advertising. Yelp is free for consumers and free for businesses to claim their listing.

Revenue comes from selling advertising products to local businesses — sponsored listings that appear at the top of search results, enhanced profiles with photos and call-to-action buttons, and Yelp Ads that target users searching for relevant businesses. Approximately 95% of revenue comes from local advertising, making Yelp essentially an ad platform for small businesses.

The company also earns from Yelp Reservations, Yelp Waitlist, and transaction-based fees on food orders. Revenue is recurring — businesses pay monthly for advertising packages — but churn is high because small businesses often cancel when they don't see immediate ROI.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI builds foundation models, the big general-purpose brains that power chatbots and other AI tools. The difference is efficiency.

Their models, called Liquid Foundation Models, are designed to do more with far less memory and computing power. Companies pay to use them, either through a cloud API or by running the models on their own machines.

That second option matters. A bank or a hospital often cannot send private data to someone else's server.

Liquid AI lets them keep the model in-house. The pitch to a customer is basically this.

You get strong AI without renting a mountain of expensive chips.

Yelp

Jeremy Stoppelman got sick after eating at a restaurant and wanted to find a doctor recommendation online. There was nothing useful.

He and Russel Simmons — both former PayPal employees — started Yelp in 2004, originally as an email-based referral system where you'd email friends asking for recommendations. That didn't work.

But they noticed that the reviews people wrote as part of the referral process were the actual valuable content. They pivoted to a review platform where anyone could write reviews of local businesses — restaurants, dentists, plumbers, mechanics, anything.

The social element was key: reviewers had profiles, could be friends, and the best reviewers became "Yelp Elite" with status and perks. By 2008, Yelp had turned reviewing restaurants into a hobby, a social activity, and for some people, an identity.

Google reportedly offered $500 million to acquire Yelp in 2009. Stoppelman turned it down and took the company public in 2012.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI is a spinout from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, better known as CSAIL. The core science came from Ramin Hasani, who spent his PhD studying the nervous system of a tiny worm called C.

elegans. That worm has just 302 neurons and still manages to move, hunt, and react to its world.

Hasani and his collaborators asked a simple question. What if you built an AI that worked more like those neurons and less like a giant static network?

The answer was the liquid neural network, a model whose internal wiring keeps adjusting even after training is done. The team incorporated the company in 2023.

Daniela Rus, who runs CSAIL and is one of the most respected robotics researchers alive, came on as a co-founder. So did Mathias Lechner and Alexander Amini, both longtime research partners of Hasani.

Yelp

User-generated content created a flywheel: more reviews attracted more consumers, which attracted more businesses, which attracted more reviewers. Yelp Elite Squad gamified reviewing, turning prolific reviewers into evangelists who hosted events and recruited new users.

SEO dominance — Yelp pages rank highly on Google for local business searches, driving organic traffic that costs nothing to acquire. City-by-city launch strategy with community managers in each market building local reviewer communities.

Advertising sales team calling local businesses directly — a labor-intensive but effective model for monetizing the platform. Mobile app became critical as smartphones made "find a restaurant near me" a constant use case.

Expansion into services (plumbers, contractors, mechanics) beyond restaurants to increase addressable market.

Liquid AI

The growth angle is size, or the lack of it. Most frontier models are so heavy they only run in data centers.

Liquid AI aims for models light enough to run on a phone, a car, or a factory robot. That opens doors the giants cannot easily reach.

The AMD partnership pushes the same idea. AMD makes chips, and it wants efficient models that show off its hardware.

So AMD led the Series A and became both an investor and a distribution partner. Liquid AI also releases open models to researchers, which builds a following before the sales team ever makes a call.

Yelp

Google is the existential threat. Google Maps reviews have overtaken Yelp in volume and are embedded directly in search results, intercepting users before they ever reach Yelp.

Stock performance has been mediocre — shares are roughly flat over the past five years while the broader market doubled. The business model depends on selling advertising to small businesses, which are notoriously difficult and expensive to sell to (high churn, small budgets, skeptical owners).

Yelp has been accused of manipulating reviews to pressure businesses into advertising — allegations the company denies but which have damaged its reputation. Review fraud (fake positive reviews, competitor sabotage reviews) is a constant battle.

And the broader shift to social media for recommendations (Instagram, TikTok, Reddit) is eroding Yelp's relevance with younger users.

Liquid AI

The honest problem is Goliath. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta have raised tens of billions of dollars between them.

Liquid AI has raised under $300 million. The transformer architecture those giants use is battle-tested and improving fast.

Liquid AI has to prove its different approach not only works but keeps working as models get bigger. Betting against the most successful design in AI history is bold.

It is also the kind of bet that ends in either a great acquisition or a quiet shutdown, with not much room in between.

Yelp

Business listings and reviews — 265+ million reviews across every local business category. Yelp for Restaurants — reservations, waitlist management, and ordering integrated into business pages.

Yelp Ads — advertising platform letting businesses target users by category, location, and intent. Yelp for Business Owners — dashboard for responding to reviews, tracking page views, and managing business info.

Yelp Elite Squad — gamified community of prolific reviewers who get invited to exclusive events. Yelp Guest Manager — restaurant management tool combining waitlist, reservations, and table management.

Yelp Knowledge Program — data licensing to power local search across third-party platforms.

Liquid AI

The main products are the Liquid Foundation Models, a family that ships in several sizes so a customer can pick the smallest one that does the job. The second generation, LFM2, arrived in 2025, including LFM2-VL vision-language models built for phones, laptops, wearables and embedded chips.

The company has leaned hard into on-device AI rather than the cloud. The focus is always the same.

Match the quality of a much larger model while using a fraction of the memory and power.

Yelp

Pre-IPO investors included Bessemer Venture Partners, Max Levchin, and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. Yelp went public on the NYSE in March 2012.

Liquid AI

It started with a $37.5 million two-stage seed in December 2023 at a $303 million valuation, from OSS Capital, PagsGroup, Automattic (the company behind WordPress), Samsung Next and others. Angels included GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, Shopify's Tobi Lütke and Red Hat co-founder Bob Young.

Then AMD Ventures led the $250 million Series A in December 2024, which is unusual because AMD is a chipmaker, not a typical venture fund. That backing gave Liquid AI both money and a hardware ally.

When a major chip company writes the lead check on an efficiency-focused model maker, it signals a bet that the future of AI is not just bigger, it is leaner.