LangChain Inc., which makes software for building and managing artificial-intelligence agents, raised $300 million in new funding at a $3 billion valuation, more than doubling its worth in about a year.
CapitalG, the growth investing arm of Alphabet Inc. and an existing backer, led the Series C round. Singapore sovereign fund GIC and DFJ Growth joined as significant new investors, along with returning investors IVP and Sapphire Ventures. Salesforce Ventures, Insight Partners, QuantumLight and MongoDB Ventures came in as new backers, and Sequoia Capital, Amplify Partners and Benchmark added to their stakes, the San Francisco company said on Friday.
LangChain last raised $125 million about a year ago at a $1.25 billion valuation in a round led by IVP.
From open source to agent control
The company started in 2022 as a popular open-source project that helped early AI models handle tasks such as searching the web and querying databases. As the big AI labs built more of those abilities into their own products, LangChain shifted toward tools for running and supervising agents once companies put them to work.
Its main product, LangSmith, lets businesses deploy, monitor, test and govern agents without tying themselves to a single model provider or cloud. LangChain says more than 7,000 organizations use it, including startups such as Harvey, Rippling and Clay and large companies such as Nvidia, Toyota and Salesforce. Workday, the company said, has cut the time needed to put a new agent into service from about five months to less than a day.
A crowded field
The pitch is that companies should own the agents that run their operations rather than rent them from a frontier lab or a cloud provider. Plenty of younger startups make a similar argument, but investors are paying for the head start LangChain has with developers. The company plans to show new LangSmith features at an event on Nov. 20.
The round caps a busy week for AI startup financing that included a $1 billion Series A for Mirendil and a $750 million raise by Mercor at a $20 billion valuation.
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