binarypublishArtificial Intelligence (AI) evaluation startup Braintrust raised $5.1 million in a seed funding round led by Greylock. The startup was founded by Ankur Goyal, who formerly led the AI team at Figma. Braintrust provides a toolkit for software developers to evaluate, tune and improve their AI products significantly quicker than traditional methods. The total capital raised by Braintrust now stands at $8.3 million. Key clients of the startup include Zapier, Airtable, Coda and Instacart.
Ankur Goyal has a long history in the AI field, with over a decade’s worth of experience, starting with his first AI startup Impira which he started in 2017. This was later acquired by Figma, where Goyal led the machine learning platform team.
Braintrust was born out of Goyal’s experience with generative AI models, which often require extensive troubleshooting and fine-tuning. With the goal of making this process more efficient, he decided to create AI-powered programs designed to accelerate the evaluation and refinement of AI applications for software developers.
Braintrust offers AI developers a toolkit consisting of programs that connect to their cloud workflows and continuously evaluate the code they’re writing. This enables developers to improve the efficiency of their work and quickly remedy any issues that occur within their AI application. Goyal stated that many of Braintrust’s customers have abandoned their own internal tools due to the superior efficiency offered by Braintrust’s tool.
Braintrust mostly focuses on pinpointing “why” something isn’t functioning correctly in an AI workflow, which sets it apart from other startups that concentrate on “observability” or simply detecting errors.
Furthermore, the company offers tools to evaluate and clean up company datasets and test prompts. Various top AI models, including those produced by OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral, are compatible with Braintrust’s API according to the company website.
