THE CRUNCH
LangChain, the startup behind the AI agent management platform LangSmith, has raised a $300 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation, the company announced on Friday. The round was led by CapitalG, with participation from Singapore's GIC, DFJ Growth, IVP and Sapphire Ventures.
The price tag is a sharp jump: the company was valued at $1.25 billion when it raised $125 million about a year ago, in a round also led by IVP. The new valuation is more than double that figure.
LangChain started in 2022 as a popular open source project handling tasks that early-stage large language models struggled with, such as searching the web, calling APIs and interacting with databases. As frontier AI labs built harnesses that now handle those jobs competently, the company shifted its focus to managing AI agents.
It says LangSmith, its agent creation and management software, avoids locking users into any particular model, cloud or ecosystem, in contrast to the major clouds and frontier AI labs, and that it contains agent behaviour and is easy to use. The company claims 7,000 LangSmith customers, including startups such as Harvey, Rippling and Clay and enterprises including Nvidia, Toyota and Salesforce. It faces plenty of competition, with other startups pitching similar advantages, but has had a head start in the crowded field.