LangChain, a pioneering AI infrastructure startup known for its innovative tools that enable the development and monitoring of applications powered by large language models (LLMs), is reportedly raising a new funding round that values the company at approximately $1 billion. This new investment is being led by IVP, as confirmed by three sources familiar with the situation.
Founded in late 2022 by Harrison Chase, who was previously an engineer at the machine learning startup Robust Intelligence, LangChain started as an open-source project. The project quickly garnered significant developer interest, leading Chase to pivot from an open-source initiative to a full-fledged startup. In April 2023, LangChain successfully raised a $10 million seed round from Benchmark, which was shortly followed by a $25 million Series A led by Sequoia, valuing the company at around $200 million.
As an early player in the AI landscape, LangChain emerged at a time when LLMs lacked vital capabilities, such as real-time information access and the ability to perform various actions, including web searching, API calls, and database interactions. The startup's open-source framework effectively addressed these challenges, enabling developers to build robust applications on top of LLM models. This innovation led to LangChain becoming a hugely popular project on GitHub, amassing over 111,000 stars and more than 18,000 forks.
Since its inception, the LLM ecosystem has evolved significantly, with new startups like LlamaIndex, Haystack, and AutoGPT offering features that rival those of LangChain. Additionally, leading LLM providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have adapted their APIs to include capabilities that were once unique to LangChain’s core technology. In response to this competitive landscape, LangChain has diversified its product offerings.
One of LangChain's notable products is LangSmith, a closed-source tool designed for the observability, evaluation, and monitoring of LLM applications, particularly agents. Since its launch last year, LangSmith has rapidly gained popularity, contributing to the company's impressive annual recurring revenue (ARR) of between $12 million and $16 million, according to multiple sources who spoke to TechCrunch. Developers can start using LangSmith for free, with an upgrade option available at $39 per month for teams seeking collaboration features. Custom plans are also available for larger organizations.
LangSmith has attracted a diverse range of clients, including notable names such as Klarna, Rippling, and Replit. While LangSmith currently dominates the emerging LLM operations sector, it faces competition from smaller, open-source alternatives like Langfuse and Helicone. Despite this competitive environment, IVP has chosen not to comment on the recent funding report.
