Meet the New Yeti: From Building Software to Building Software Companies
For fifteen years, Yeti has helped founders turn ambitious ideas into software. Today, we're taking that mission a step further:
We're no longer just building software — we're building software companies.
Yeti has expanded beyond traditional product development to become an end-to-end AI transformation and investment partner for founder-owned service businesses. We now bring technology, funding, product expertise, and go-to-market strategy together under one roof, giving experienced founders what they need to turn firsthand industry insight into scalable AI-powered businesses.
It’s a big shift, but it didn’t happen overnight. In many ways, it’s the natural result of everything we’ve learned over the past fifteen years.
Building Great Products Was Only the Beginning
Tony Scherba and Rudy Mutter founded Yeti in 2010 with a simple goal: to help entrepreneurs turn ambitious ideas into impactful software. Over the next fifteen years, Yeti partnered with startups, global brands, and founder-led businesses to design and develop innovative digital products across a wide range of industries. Along the way, we learned firsthand not just how to build a great product, but how to give it a real shot at success
The biggest lesson we’ve learned? Great software is only part of the equation.
Over the years, we’ve seen far too many promising products fail to gain the traction they deserved — not because they lacked potential, but because a successful software business requires far more than a great product. The right business model, access to capital, and a clear go-to-market strategy are just as critical as the product itself — and, without them, even exceptional ideas can fail to reach their full potential.
That realization reshaped how we thought about Yeti’s role. If we truly wanted to help founders build successful software businesses, delivering the product could no longer be the finish line. We needed to support the full journey — bringing together the technology, capital, business strategy, and long-term partnership required to take a strong idea from development to market, and from product to company.
AI Opened the Door for a New Kind of Software Company
As our thinking about Yeti’s role evolved, AI was rewriting the economics of building software. For years, countless problems inside real businesses had gone unsolved because building custom software to fix them never made financial sense. AI changed that. Problems that were once too small, too niche, or too specific to justify solving were suddenly within reach.
As we spoke with small business owners about the ways AI could transform their industries, one thing became increasingly clear: some of AI’s most compelling opportunities wouldn’t come from traditional technology companies chasing the next big platform. They would come from the people closest to the problems: business owners with a deep, firsthand understanding of where their industries fall short and where better technology could make a meaningful difference.
That realization gave us a new way to think about what Yeti could become. Instead of waiting for founders to arrive with a finished software concept, we began partnering with experienced service business owners who already understood the problems worth solving.
They brought the industry knowledge, customer insight, and firsthand experience; we brought the technology, capital, and business strategy needed to turn that expertise into a scalable product. Together, we began building new software companies with the potential to reshape the industries they came from.
Today, that’s exactly who we’re looking to partner with: founder-owned service businesses that can see where their industries could work better. The opportunity may already be a product idea, or it may begin with a recurring frustration, inefficient process, or unmet need that has never been solved well. When that kind of firsthand insight points to a problem AI can solve at scale, it can become the foundation for something much bigger.
If you see an opportunity for AI to solve a real problem in your industry, we'd love to hear about it!
The New Yeti In Action
Our first two portfolio companies, Sulu and ClearDraft, illustrate what Yeti’s new approach looks like in practice. In both cases, the founders brought deep industry expertise and a clear understanding of a meaningful problem with the potential to be solved at scale through AI. Yeti brought the technology, product strategy, and go-to-market expertise needed to turn those insights into products — and ultimately, into scalable software companies.
Introducing Sulu
Sulu grew out of our long-running partnership with GoCar, the pioneering GPS-guided tour company founded by Nathan Withrington. At the time, GoCar faced a significant operational challenge: creating and updating tours was slow, labor-intensive, and difficult to scale, with each new experience often taking weeks to produce.
Yeti built a custom AI-powered platform that transformed that process, reducing tour creation from weeks to hours and making it faster, easier, and more cost-effective for GoCar to launch new experiences and keep existing tours current. Paired with broader business consulting and operational improvements, the platform also helped support GoCar’s expansion into new markets.
As the technology evolved, it became clear that the opportunity extended far beyond GoCar. Tour and attraction operators across the industry were facing many of the same challenges, creating an opening to turn an internal operational solution into a scalable software business.
Together, Yeti and Nathan co-founded Sulu, an AI-powered platform that helps operators create, manage, and deliver self-guided GPS experiences more efficiently. Today, Sulu brings AI-generated narration, multilingual translation, tour management, and content distribution into a single platform, making it easier for operators to launch new tours, keep content current, expand into new markets, and reach travelers around the world.
Yeti continues to lead Sulu’s product development, AI innovation, strategy, and commercialization, while Nathan contributes decades of industry expertise, customer insight, and strategic relationships. That combination has become a clear example of the new Yeti model in action: deep founder expertise paired with the technology and business resources to turn a proven opportunity into a scalable software company.
Introducing ClearDraft
Before a book, magazine, or newspaper reaches readers, it passes through a critical legal checkpoint called media clearance: a careful review of the manuscript for legal risk, from privacy issues and contempt to defamation and beyond. Traditionally, this has been slow, specialized work, done line by line by trained media lawyers.
With decades of experience practicing media law, veteran lawyers Alex Wade and David Burgess had seen firsthand how the demands of modern publishing were beginning to strain the traditional clearance process. As the volume of content being produced continued to grow, clearance remained largely unchanged — manual, time-consuming, and resource-intensive — making it increasingly difficult for legal teams to keep pace.
Alex and David saw a way through: use AI to give legal teams a faster, more consistent starting point, without asking them to sacrifice rigor for speed. They brought that idea and their deep legal expertise to Yeti with a clear goal: build a platform that could review content of any length in a fraction of the time, surface potential legal issues, and give legal teams a focused foundation for their own deeper analysis.
Together, we built ClearDraft, an AI-powered media clearance platform that scans manuscripts for passages containing potential legal risk, including defamation, privacy issues, contempt, and regulatory compliance concerns — dramatically faster than traditional review. For each flagged passage, ClearDraft generates a detailed report with annotated explanations, applicable legal defenses, and rewrite assistance, giving legal teams a focused starting point for deeper review and allowing them to spend more time on the judgment and strategy where their expertise matters most.
Today, major media organizations are using ClearDraft to modernize their pre-publication review processes, helping accelerate publication timelines, reduce costs, and create a faster, more efficient approach to legal clearance.
Like Sulu, ClearDraft reflects the core of Yeti's model: take an expert who deeply understands how an industry works, pair that insight with world-class technology, and build something with the power to change how the entire sector operates.
What comes next
Yeti may look very different today than it did when we started in 2010, but the belief behind the work is still the same: the best ideas come from people who understand a problem deeply and are willing to build something better.
What’s changed is the way we’re able to support those ideas. By staying involved beyond development, we can help founders carry their insight further — from a problem worth solving to a product worth building, and from a product to a business with real staying power.
For us, that makes this evolution feel less like a departure from what Yeti has always been and more like the next step in it. We’re still helping entrepreneurs turn meaningful ideas into something real — only now, we have the ability to help those ideas grow into companies with the potential to reshape entire industries.
