LangChain announced on Monday that it has raised 125 million dollars at a valuation of 1.25 billion dollars. TechCrunch had previously reported in July that the company, a provider of a popular open source framework for building AI agents, was seeking fresh funding at a valuation of at least one billion dollars. The deal was led by IVP. New investors CapitalG and Sapphire Ventures participated, alongside existing investors Sequoia, Benchmark, and Amplify.
LangChain began in 2022 as an open source project founded by machine learning engineer Harrison Chase. The startup quickly became an early standout in the AI era by solving difficult problems associated with building applications using early-stage large language models. These challenges included searching the web, calling APIs, and interacting with databases. The project became a massive hit, leading Chase to launch a startup with a 10 million dollar seed round from Benchmark in April 2023. Just one week later, Chase raised a 25 million dollar Series A round led by Sequoia, which reportedly valued LangChain at 200 million dollars.
As leading model makers have incorporated more infrastructure, LangChain has evolved into a platform for building agents. Alongside announcing its unicorn status, the company also launched updates to all of its major products. These include its agent builder LangChain, its orchestration and context tool LangGraph, and its testing and observability tool LangSmith. LangChain continues to be extremely popular among open source developers, with 118,000 stars and 19,400 forks on GitHub.