Braintrust, an AI observability platform, has raised $80M in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital.

The platform enables AI engineering and product teams to trace production AI, run evaluations, compare models and prompts, and continuously improve quality to deliver reliable AI products at scale. Customers include Notion, Stripe, Zapier, Vercel, Ramp, Coursera, Dropbox, Replit, and Graphite. The funding will accelerate development of features like Loop and Brainstore while expanding the team to meet growing demand.

Production AI Infrastructure Funding Surges

The timing aligns with surging investments in AI reliability tools. Helicone, a focused LLM monitoring platform, raised $30M in Series A funding in October 2024. Braintrust's comprehensive approach—including autonomous eval improvement and scalable trace storage—fills gaps in agentic AI debugging left by narrower competitors.

Opaque AI Workflows Hinder Scaling

Production AI introduces complex issues like high latency, escalating costs, and quality failures in nested tool calls and agent interactions. Fragmented tools leave teams blind to root causes, slowing debugging and iteration. For instance, before Braintrust, Notion teams faced prolonged issue resolution times, while Coursera gathered limited feedback.

Braintrust Traces End-to-End AI Execution

Braintrust provides real-time observability for prompts, responses, tool calls, latency, cost, quality, and alerts. Its Evals system enables model/prompt experiments, automated/human scoring, versioned datasets, and CI regression testing. Unlike single-purpose tools, it integrates framework-agnostic SDKs for Python, TypeScript, Go, Ruby, and Java, plus IDE tools like MCP.

Loop, an AI agent, auto-generates optimized prompts, scorers, and datasets from production traces. Brainstore, a custom database, handles queries over millions of complex traces efficiently.

As Braintrust CEO Brian Raymond stated:

"We’ve seen a massive shift: AI is moving from research experiments to core product features."

Sequoia Validates Observability Priority

Sequoia Capital led the round with Index Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Gradient Ventures participating. This strategic validation highlights observability as foundational for AI product maturity, blending growth capital with infrastructure focus. Total funding now exceeds $121M following the $36M Series A in October 2024 and $5M seed.

AI Observability Market Accelerates Growth

The AI observability market will grow from $0.77B in 2023 to $5.98B by 2030 at a 33.2% CAGR, fueled by production AI demands. Competitor activity reflects this: Helicone's $30M infusion targets usage tracking, while Braintrust emphasizes full lifecycle improvement. Compliance features like SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA support enterprise adoption.

Traction proves impact: Notion achieved 10x faster issue resolution, Coursera 45x more feedback, and Graphite a 5% reduction in negative rules.