AI Agent Builder LangChain Joins the Unicorn Club
The open-source AI framework maker raised $125 million at a $1.25 billion valuation.
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LangChain, the company known for popularising agentic AI, has raised $125 million in new funding, valuing it at $1.25 billion. The round was led by IVP, with participation from CapitalG, Sapphire Ventures, and longtime backers Sequoia, Benchmark, and Amplify.
The news cements LangChain’s transition from an open-source experiment into one of the defining platforms of the generative AI club. The company, founded in 2022 by Harrison Chase, a machine-learning engineer, began as an attempt to solve what early large language models couldn’t. LLMs could talk and hallucinate but connecting them to the web, APIs, or databases required scaffolding. LangChain provided that, offering developers a framework to stitch automation into function.
Within months of launch, it became the default tool for anyone building AI apps. Chase’s GitHub repository turned into a Mecca for open-source developers, amassing over a hundred thousand stars. Benchmark quickly led a $10 million seed round in April 2023, followed by a $25 million Series A from Sequoia just a week later. Back then, LangChain was valued at around $200 million. Eighteen months later, it’s worth more than six times that.
As OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google deepened their model offerings, developers began to focus on the “agentic” layer which gives these models the autonomy. LangChain positioned itself squarely in this layer. Its core software allows engineers to build an agent in as little as ten lines of code. A unified API enables switching between model providers, removing the friction of rewriting code each time.
Over time, the ecosystem expanded. LangGraph, another open-source tool, helps agents run continuously, recover from errors, and even accept human oversight. Deep Agents, gives the ability for an agent to decompose complex problems into steps, assign subtasks to sub-agents, and adjust plans mid-process.
While the open-source side continues to flourish, LangChain’s commercial engine is LangSmith, a paid product that lets teams build, test, deploy, and monitor AI agents in one place, tracking costs and latency while offering observability tools that highlight where agents struggle.
According to TechCrunch, LangChain generated between $12 million and $16 million in annualized recurring revenue as of June. A spokesperson told Fortune that number has since grown.
