LangChain Inc. has raised $300 million in a funding round led by CapitalG, the growth fund of Alphabet Inc., the company confirmed. IVP, Sapphire Ventures, GIC and DFJ Growth also participated in the round, which values the San Francisco-based startup at $3 billion.
LangChain is best known for an open-source framework of the same name that it released in 2022. The software cuts down the work required to build artificial intelligence agents, making it easier to connect an agent to a large language model, integrate it with tools and add a system prompt. Developers can also customize details such as the format of prompt responses.
The company's open-source portfolio includes two other tools. LangGraph is aimed at tasks too complex for a single agent, linking multiple LangChain-powered agents into one automation workflow and adding elements such as a mechanism that requires human approval for sensitive actions. Deep Agents extends LangChain and LangGraph with features for complex work, including a virtual file system where agents store data, a work planning tool and subagent generation.
LangChain earns revenue through a paid product suite called LangSmith, which developers use to build agents and maintain them in production. The software saves successive agent iterations in a centralized repository, letting teams restore an earlier bug-free version if an update introduces a bug and compare output quality across versions to decide which should be deployed. LangSmith also offers observability features that generate traces describing every step an agent took to process a prompt, analyze them for technical issues, rank those issues by severity and produce code fixes.
After its previous funding round last year, LangChain disclosed that its open-source tools were being downloaded about 90 million times per month. Autodesk Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and a long list of other technology firms use the LangSmith suite.
LangChain reportedly plans to nearly double its headcount to 850 employees by the end of 2027. The company intends to hire infrastructure experts, AI engineers, salespeople and marketers.
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