Braintrust just secured $80M in Series B funding at an $800M valuation. Let that breathe for a second. ICONIQ led the round, with Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, Basecase Capital, and Elad Gil doubling down. When firms like that lean forward instead of sitting back, it is not a courtesy clap. It is conviction.
Congratulations to Ankur Goyal, Founder and CEO of Braintrust, for building something the AI world desperately needed but could not quite articulate. And respect to the technical leadership driving the platform forward. This is what happens when operators who have lived the pain decide to architect the cure.
Ankur Goyal did not wake up one morning and decide observability sounded trendy. He felt the friction firsthand at Impira and later leading AI and ML efforts at Figma. Evaluating models. Debugging prompts. Watching agents behave like prodigies one minute and toddlers the next. That frustration became Braintrust.
Now the company powers AI-native observability for teams building real products with real consequences. Not demos. Not sandbox toys. Production AI. The kind that runs inside companies like Notion, Stripe, Vercel, Airtable, Instacart, Zapier, Coda, The Browser Company, Replit, Cloudflare, Ramp, and Dropbox.
Braintrust does not just log tokens and call it insight. It traces prompts, tool calls, reasoning steps, latency, and cost. It turns evaluation into a first-class signal. It built Brainstore, a purpose-built database optimized for AI traces, reportedly enabling queries up to 80% faster. When your AI agent takes 10 steps before breakfast, you need receipts. Braintrust hands you the ledger.
Here is the business lesson. Infrastructure wins when it is born from scar tissue. Braintrust raised $5.1M in seed funding, then $36M in Series A, and now $80M more because it did not chase noise. It solved a painful, expensive problem for teams running more than 10 experiments a day and paying serious money to get it right.
AI is graduating from magic trick to mission critical. When that shift happens, observability stops being optional. It becomes oxygen. Ankur Goyal and the Braintrust team are not selling hype. They are selling clarity in a market drunk on possibility. And clarity, especially in AI, is a premium product.
