Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

AI infrastructure, developer tools, observability, and workflow orchestration startup LangChain Inc. has raised $100 million in new funding at an approximate $1 billion valuation led by IVP, according to TechCrunch.

The company [the team in the picture above] had previously raised $35 million in two rounds from investors, including Benchmark Capital Management Company, Sequoia Capital, and Amplify Partners, reportedly valuing LangChain at $200 million at the time.

Founded in 2022 as an open-source project by engineer Harrison Chase, LangChain develops infrastructure and tools designed to simplify the creation of applications powered by LLMs for developers and companies. The company provides modular components that connect LLMs with data, tools, application programming interfaces, and workflows, enabling more advanced and interactive AI behavior.

LangChain’s core offering is a framework that enables developers to chain together calls to LLMs, search systems, and other tools. This approach supports complex, multi-step reasoning, agent-based workflows, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipelines.

The startup’s open-source code has addressed these problems by providing a framework for building apps on top of LLM models. It has become a hugely popular project on GitHub (111,000 stars, over 18,000 forks).

The company offers various tools to assist users in managing and interacting with LLMs, including LangSmith, a separate, closed-source product for observability, evaluation, and monitoring of LLM applications, specifically agents.

LangSmith has led the company to achieve annual recurring revenue (ARR) between $12 million and $16 million, according to TechCrunch.

Competitors of LangSmith are open-source Langfuse and Helicone.

There’s also LangServe, a tool for turning LangChain applications into production-ready APIs. The tool makes it easier to deploy and scale language model workflows in real environments without building infrastructure from scratch.

IBL News | New York

Boston University (BU) announced it is cutting its annual $2.5 billion operating budget by 5% for the upcoming year and laying off 120 staff members, primarily due to the “recent and ongoing federal actions” by the Trump administration. BU will also eliminate 120 jobs that are currently open.

University leaders also cited other challenges such as declining graduate enrollment, a looming demographic drop-off in high school seniors, and rising inflation.

In addition, as a popular destination for international students (with a third of its students from abroad) and a research institution, BU can be impacted by the White House’s moves to restrict student visas and cut federal research spending. In 2024, it received $579 million in federal research funding.

Boston University’s President Melissa Gilliam said, “There is no way around this. Yet, it is also a necessary step in ensuring our future.”

Another challenge is the new increase to the federal endowment tax passed by Congress this month, which raises the rate from 1.4% to 4-8%.

About 3,000 graduate and PhD students who teach classes and conduct research at BU also received a sizable raise in October after a months-long strike.