Open source proxy startup LangChain is valued at $1.25 billion

The company announced Monday that it has raised $125 million at a valuation of $1.25 billion. TechCrunch reported in July that the provider of a popular open source framework for building AI agents was raising new funds worth at least $1 billion. The deal was led by IVP, as previously mentioned. New investors CapitalG and Sapphire Ventures joined, as did existing investors Sequoia, Benchmark and Amplify.

LangChain started in 2022 as an open source project founded by machine learning engineer Harrison Chase. The startup was an early darling of the AI ​​era, solving problems that made building applications with early-stage LLMs difficult, such as searching the web, connecting to application programming interfaces (APIs), and interacting with databases. It was an overwhelming success, and Chase launched the startup with a $10 million seed round from Benchmark in April 2023. A week later, Chase raised a $25 million Series A led by Sequoia, reportedly valuing LangChain at $200 million.

As sophisticated modellers add more infrastructure, LangChain has evolved into a platform for construction agents. In addition to announcing its unicorn status, the company launched updates to all of its major products, including its proxy builder LangChain, the orchestration and context/memory tool LangGraph, and the testing/observability tool LangSmith. LangChain remains very popular among open source developers, with 118,000 stars and 19.4 forks on GitHub.