San Francisco-based Braintrust, a new player aiming to provide critical infrastructure for companies building AI-enabled products, announced a $5.1 million seed funding round today. The round was led by Saam Motamedi from Greylock Partners.
The funding comes on the heels of exponential growth for Braintrust, which has doubled both its customer base and team size in the six weeks since its pre-seed raise. High-profile customers using Braintrust's machine learning infrastructure already include leading no-code startups like Zapier, Airtable, and Coda.
The journey of building on the new AI paradigm has been a thrilling mix of progress, innovation, and occasional drama, as described by Ankur Goyal, the driving force behind Braintrust. The field of AI, though nascent, has seen a swift adoption among leading companies worldwide, integrating AI capabilities into their products. However, a significant challenge persists in the realm of AI development – the practice of 'evals', or the systematic and predictable measurement of AI system performance.
Evaluating AI systems has become a critical component in the AI development loop. Given the inherent complexity of AI problems and the absence of exact logical specifications for solutions, AI engineers focus on measuring correctness using context-specific data and metrics. This approach necessitates rapid experimentation with various models, prompts, fine-tuning, and techniques to achieve the desired outcomes. In this landscape, measurement and evaluation hold equal, if not greater, importance than the coding itself.
Through partnerships with companies like Zapier, Coda, Airtable, and Instacart, Braintrust has evolved into a comprehensive toolkit for coding instrumentation and running evaluations. This toolkit empowers teams to assess, log, refine, and enhance their AI-enabled products as a core part of their development loop. Users have reported significant improvements in system accuracy, faster shipping cycles, increased product engagement, and enhanced team collaboration, all within a few weeks of using Braintrust.
Greylock partner Saam Motamedi, who led the round, is bullish on Braintrust's potential. "Enabling developers to build with AI is the highest potential opportunity in my lifetime to innovate with data," he said. "Braintrust has built fundamental infrastructure that will power the next generation of AI applications."
The addition of Greylock to Braintrust's roster of investors, which includes notable names like Elad Gil, Basecase Capital, SV Angel, and several prominent angel investors, further solidifies the company's position in the AI landscape.
The startup plans to leverage the new capital to accelerate hiring across engineering, product, and go-to-market teams. Braintrust's seed funding and early customer momentum suggest its initial traction warrants attention as a potential breakout in the red-hot AI infrastructure space.