Investor Update
Q1 2026
Dear Noodle Investors,
In January, I told you something had shifted. The destination remains clear, but the road requires constant adjustment. This is the nature of building something new. I want to be honest with you about how the last quarter has unfolded, on the good and the hard, and where we are heading from here.
What Is Working
We closed Q1 with over a thousand users on the platform, up from roughly 450 at the time of the January update. These users span dozens of countries and a wide range of business verticals, from solopreneurs to teams inside larger organisations. The signal from Product Hunt has held: businesses everywhere recognise they need to be present inside AI conversations, and they continue to find us without us having to push.
More importantly, the thesis is playing out across the industry. When we started telling investors that every major AI platform would build its own app ecosystem, it was a bet. It is no longer a bet.
In January, Anthropic launched MCP Apps, bringing interactive third-party applications directly into Claude. The MCP Apps specification was developed in collaboration with OpenAI, building on the same ChatGPT Apps SDK we have been working with from day one. Perplexity held its first developer conference in March, launched its Computer agent, and partnered with PayPal to enable in-conversation commerce. Google launched Gemini Enterprise with an agent marketplace and third-party integrations, though this remains enterprise-focused for now. And just this week, I learned from conversations with people close to the Meta AI team that Meta has also added an Apps section in its settings with a small initial set of applications, and is planning to extend it into consumer products including Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
Every major AI platform is converging on the same model: apps and services embedded inside AI conversations. The specific protocol may vary by platform, or it may converge on MCP Apps over time, but this is not a meaningful obstacle for us. Noodle Seed powers the customer experience regardless of the protocol underneath, and we can implement against whichever protocols the platforms adopt.
On the product, our embeddable widget Halo is now live on customer websites, and we have been building out discoverability features and website auditing tools.
In the last week we also closed two design partnerships with credible businesses we are proud to work with. For investors unfamiliar with the term, a design partnership is an arrangement where a paying customer works closely with us to validate, shape, and refine the product. The first is an AI-native travel planning company, founded by experienced consumer operators and backed by prominent travel and consumer investors. The second is a private aviation marketplace, in effect an Airbnb for private jet rentals. These are not S&P 500 companies, but they are a meaningful tier above the typical solopreneur that signs up organically, and they have chosen to put their trust in us early.
On 26 March we hosted the first Wildcard event in San Francisco, a small community evening for founders, operators, and builders thinking about AI-first customer channels. About a dozen people came, including current users, startup founders, and operators from Google and other companies. It was deliberately small, and we shall do more of these as we learn.
Finally, we have closed the capital we need for this phase of growth. We are not actively seeking new funding and are operating from a position of strength rather than necessity.
Where We Have Challenges
I want to be transparent about where revenue sits. Of the thousand-plus signups, only a handful have organically upgraded to paid accounts. Even those few did not need to upgrade, because none have hit any usage limits on the free tier. We have not yet optimised the platform for upgrades. Instead, we are using this phase to learn from a broad user base: what people are actually using, what features they ask for, what they value, and where and why they drop off. The revenue conversation comes later.
The larger bottleneck is the ChatGPT App Store. We have submitted more than 70 applications on behalf of our customers. None have gone live yet. This is the single biggest challenge we are working through right now.
OpenAI is still maturing their app review process, and we have been going back and forth with them on multiple dimensions. Some of the feedback has been technical. Some has been about the content and metadata of individual apps. Some has been about account mechanics, including a policy change that now requires each customer to submit from their own OpenAI platform account rather than from ours. Some has been about privacy policy compliance. Each of these is solvable, and we are working through them in parallel with the OpenAI team. The review process is also unpredictable: applications are not reviewed in the order they are submitted, and the prioritisation logic is something we are still learning alongside the OpenAI team.
Beyond the platform bottleneck, I have personally been in conversation with a much broader set of businesses this quarter. Some are moving quickly. Others are still investigating, taking a wait-and-see approach. The wait-and-see crowd is shaped partly by the newness of this category, and partly by a healthy memory of previous platform moments that took longer to mature than early enthusiasm suggested. That hesitation is real, and it will resolve itself once live applications start delivering real value to real end users.
Our Focus for Q2
Going forward, we are orienting the entire company around a single goal: getting live customer applications on the ChatGPT App Store, and soon after, the Claude app platform. This is a chicken and egg problem. We have a platform that works. Customers come to us with a certain level of confidence. But for real social proof, people need to see actual customer applications running and live inside the app stores, powered by us. We believe we have enough to crack the egg and get the first three to five applications live within the next few weeks. Once that happens, the conversation changes, and we will be in a much stronger position to drive the next phase of growth.
Our strategy for getting there rests on a balance question we have been actively navigating. Initially, we offered everyone the same out-of-the-box capabilities of our platform and listened to the long list of requests that came in from almost every customer. Each business wanted something specific to its own workflow. Do we say no to those requests and stay focused on the platform, or do we say yes and build custom capabilities that are initially valuable to one customer, then figure out how to integrate them into the platform for everyone else later? There is no single right answer. We will go back and forth on this balance until we find the sweet spot.
For now, we have chosen to work closely with a handful of select design partners who meet specific criteria: a mature enough platform, API, and design guidelines and assets that we can move quickly together. We have already closed two such partnerships and are in active conversations to close several more in the coming weeks. The revenue is meaningful but not the point. The point is to learn deeply from a small set of high-trust customers, build what they need to get live on the platforms, and then fold those learnings back into the platform so we can serve many more customers afterwards.
The deeper goal of these partnerships is to build out customer acquisition funnels that run from ChatGPT directly into each customer's platform, end to end. Once those funnels exist and work, we can productise the capability so that any business, regardless of industry or user experience, can build its own customer acquisition funnel on Noodle Seed and expose it across every major AI platform.
We are also deliberately holding off on expanding to new channels like Meta surfaces. Even though the opportunity there is becoming more real with every platform announcement, staying focused on the single goal of live apps matters more right now than expanding the surface area.
Our next significant moment is the Startup Grind event at the end of April, where we shall have a meaningful presence and use it as a launchpad for the next phase of customer acquisition.
In Closing
The market is moving in our direction. Every major AI platform is converging on the model we bet on. The demand is real. The challenge in front of us is execution, and that is entirely within our control.
We shall continue putting one step in front of the other, expanding the product, deepening our design partnerships, and building the community. We shall not lower our ambition, and we shall not shy away from the harder parts of the work. The opportunity in front of us is one of the largest any of us will see in our working lives, and we are privileged to be the ones building towards it.
None of this would be possible without you. Your belief in us, your capital, and your willingness to stand with us at this early stage is what makes this work possible. We are grateful, and we are mindful every day that we are accountable to that belief.
Thank you for continuing to stand with us.
