LangChain, a startup focused on AI infrastructure and tooling for building large language model (LLM) applications, is reportedly closing in on a fresh round of funding that will value the company at nearly $1 billion. The investment is said to be led by venture capital firm IVP, according to multiple sources familiar with the deal.
The company began as an open-source project in late 2022, founded by Harrison Chase, then an engineer at Robust Intelligence. Its early success with developers led Chase to formally launch LangChain as a company. In April 2023, it raised a $10 million seed round from Benchmark, quickly followed by a $25 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital, which placed the company’s valuation at around $200 million.
LangChain gained traction by providing tools to bridge the gap between LLMs and real-world tasks, such as accessing real-time information, using APIs, and interacting with databases—capabilities not natively supported in foundational models at the time. Its open-source framework became widely adopted, amassing over 111,000 stars and more than 18,000 forks on GitHub.
With the rapid evolution of AI tools and increased competition from platforms like LlamaIndex, Haystack, and AutoGPT, LangChain expanded its offerings. One major addition is LangSmith, a closed-source observability and monitoring platform for LLM agents. This product has been a strong growth driver, reportedly generating annual recurring revenue (ARR) between $12 million and $16 million, according to insiders.
LangSmith provides developers with tools for evaluating and debugging LLM-based applications and is already being used by companies like Klarna, Rippling, and Replit. The platform offers both free access and premium plans, starting at $39 per month for team features, with enterprise plans available.
Though LangSmith is facing competition from emerging platforms such as Langfuse and Helicone, it currently leads the LLM observability space. The expected funding round, if finalized, will make LangChain one of the few early open-source AI tools to evolve into a unicorn
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