Braintrust Data Inc.
Category: AI Infrastructure
AI-native observability and evaluation platform for monitoring AI models, agents, and LLM applications in production. Braintrust Data Inc. was founded in 2023. The company is led by Ankur Goyal. Based in San Francisco, California, United States. Team size: 101-500. Total funding raised: $124M. Latest round: Series B. Key investors include ICONIQ Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Elad Gil, Basecase Capital, SV Angel, Box Group, Datadog, Databricks Ventures.
- Founded
- 2023
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California, United States
- Team size
- 101-500
- Total funding
- $124M
Value proposition
Braintrust is the active observability layer for production AI — integrating tracing, evaluation, and automated pattern discovery in one platform purpose-built for the scale and complexity of AI agents and LLM applications.
Products and solutions
Braintrust Observability (trace production AI agents, monitor latency/cost/quality), Braintrust Evals (run experiments, compare prompts/models, score outputs), Braintrust Discovery (Topics - automatic pattern discovery, online scoring, quality gates), Loop (AI agent that generates better prompts, scorers, and datasets), Brainstore (purpose-built database for AI observability data, 80% faster at querying complex AI traces), Braintrust Gateway (proxy layer for routing and monitoring AI model calls), MCP Server (connect coding agents to AI stack from IDE)
Unique value
Unlike traditional observability tools (Datadog, etc.) that can't handle the scale of multi-step agent traces, Braintrust's purpose-built Brainstore database is 80% faster at querying complex AI traces, and its Topics feature automatically surfaces patterns (issues, sentiment, tasks) that teams didn't know to look for.
Target customer
AI engineering and product teams at technology companies building and deploying LLM applications and AI agents in production.
Industries served
Technology/SaaS, Enterprise Software, AI/ML
Technology advantage
Purpose-built Brainstore database for AI observability data; automated pattern discovery (Topics); AI-assisted optimization (Loop); framework-agnostic SDKs (Python, TypeScript, Go, Ruby, C#); hybrid deployment (cloud or self-hosted data plane); SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR compliant.
How they differentiate
Braintrust differentiates through: (1) Brainstore — a custom-built database for AI trace data that outperforms traditional databases; (2) Topics — automatic pattern discovery that surfaces unknown issues; (3) Loop — an AI agent that autonomously improves prompts, scorers, and datasets; (4) Deep integration of evals + observability in one workflow; (5) SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR compliant with hybrid deployment options.
Main competitors
Arize AI (Phoenix), Langfuse, Datadog LLM Observability, Galileo AI, Fiddler AI, Comet (Opik), Helicone
Key partnerships
Vercel (AI SDK integration), Datadog (investor/partner), Databricks Ventures (investor/partner), HuggingFace (angel investor relationship)
Notable customers
Notion, Replit, Cloudflare, Ramp, Dropbox, Stripe, Vercel, Airtable, Zapier, Coda, Instacart, Coursera
Major milestones
Founded August 2023, Pre-seed from Elad Gil (Sep 2023), $5.1M Seed led by Greylock (Dec 2023), $36M Series A led by a16z at ~$150M valuation (Oct 2024), Launched Brainstore database, Launched Loop AI assistant, $80M Series B led by ICONIQ at $800M valuation (Feb 2026), First user conference "Trace" at California Academy of Sciences (Feb 2026)
Market positioning
Braintrust is positioned as the leading AI-native observability platform purpose-built for production AI agents, competing against both open-source tools (Langfuse, Arize Phoenix) and traditional APM vendors (Datadog). It differentiates through its custom database (Brainstore), automated pattern discovery, and deep eval-observability integration.
Geographic focus
Global (headquartered in San Francisco, expanding to EMEA)
About Ankur Goyal
Ex-Co-founder of Impira (acquired by Figma); former Head of Machine Learning Platform at Figma; former engineer at MemSQL (SingleStore); studied Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
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Official website: https://www.braintrust.dev