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by iiJDSii 503 days ago
I've heard this idea echoed quite a few times.

But can anybody name a wrapper company as/more valuable than foundation model companies like OpenAI, DeepSeek, Anthropic, Mistral, etc?

Only one that comes to mind is Perplexity, but they're a bit more than a wrapper startup - I think there's some hardcore engineering to get their web search product working so well.

2 comments

Of course there aren't any that are more valuable.

But take Notion, Asana, Trello. All of them started out.. like a UI around a database. And they're plenty valuable now. More valuable than Oracle, the highest valued DB company? Maybe not, but still very much successful companies. They didn't start out with 500 integrations.

I think Character.ai is already very profitable, and that's a pure wrapper.

> But can anybody name a wrapper company as/more valuable than foundation model companies

Ask the same question about databases. Then consider these wrapper companies: Salesforce, LinkedIn, AirBnB, Workday, ...

The only database company worth more then Salesforce is Oracle. Other database companies are worth much less.