Braintrust's seed round: $5m to build infrastructure for AI products

I'm excited to announce that Saam Motamedi from Greylock is leading our $5.1m seed round, bringing our total capital raised to $8.3m! Braintrust has become critical infrastructure that powers AI at leading technology companies like Zapier, Coda, Airtable, and Instacart. Since we announced our last round just 6 weeks ago, we've doubled both our team and customer base. This round builds on our momentum and allows us to accelerate our vision of building world-class infrastructure for AI products.

Over the past year, building on top of the new AI paradigm has been a continuous rollercoaster of progress, innovation, occasional drama, and frankly the most fun I've had in my career. Despite how nascent the practice is, within a short time, many of the world's leading companies have started shipping products featuring generative AI. At the same time, if you talk to engineers building with AI, you'll consistently hear one painful challenge they all face: “evals”, the practice of systematically and predictably measuring how well an AI system performs.

Evaluation has become an essential component of the development loop in AI software. AI problems are by their nature difficult to define, and it is usually impossible to produce an exact logical specification of their solution. The AI engineer's task is instead to measure correctness using context-specific data and metrics, and then rapidly experiment with various models, prompts, fine-tuning, and other techniques to achieve the desired results. In AI engineering, measurement and evaluation are of equal, if not greater, importance than the code used to achieve their ends.

By partnering with customers like Zapier, Coda, Airtable, and Instacart we've built Braintrust into a toolkit for instrumenting code and running evaluations, enabling teams to assess, log, refine, and enhance their AI-enabled products as a core part of their dev loop. I'm inspired every day by stories from users about how Braintrust has helped them improve the accuracy of their systems by 30%+ in just a few weeks of use, leading to faster ship cycles, increased product engagement, and better team collaboration. We can do all of this within the customer's cloud environment, so Braintrust is safe to use for even the most data-sensitive tasks.

I've spent my entire career helping companies innovate with data, and it's very clear to me that enabling developers to build with AI is the highest potential opportunity in my lifetime to do that. The team at Greylock shares this vision, and today I'm excited to announce that Saam Motamedi is leading our $5.1m seed round, bringing our total capital raised to $8.3m. I've known Saam and Greylock for almost a decade, and I've consistently admired how they partner with founders at their earliest stages and together, build enduring businesses. After our first conversation about Braintrust, Saam instantly realized that evals are fundamental in the shift to non-deterministic software, introduced me to a number of potential customers, and started brainstorming what Braintrust could become a decade from now.

I'm thrilled to add Greylock to our existing set of investors, which includes Elad Gil, Basecase Capital, SV Angel, Box Group, and a rockstar group of angel investors including Clem Delangue, CEO of HuggingFace; Greg Brockman, Co-founder and President of OpenAI; Howie Liu, CEO of Airtable; Jack Altman, Founder of Lattice; Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel; Bryan Helmig, CTO of Zapier; Simon Last, CTO of Notion; Vipul Ved Prakash, CEO of Together; Tuhin Srivastava, CEO of Baseten; Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog; Qasar Younis, CEO of Applied Intuition; and Gautum Kedia, ML Leader at Stripe.

I feel incredibly fortunate to work with a once-in-a-lifetime group of colleagues, investors, and customers. Each and every one of them is someone I would want to work for, and to be honest a lot of startup building is just that. To learn more about Braintrust or sign up for the product, check out our website, docs, or reach out. We are still building our core team, so please check out our careers page if you are interested in joining us.