Braintrust, an AI observability platform focused on production environments, announced it has raised $80 million in Series B funding as it looks to become the infrastructure layer for production AI systems. The round was led by ICONIQ, with participation from returning investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, Elad Gil, and Basecase Capital, among others.
Braintrust was founded after CEO Ankur Goyal experienced firsthand the challenges of building internal evaluation tools at prior companies, including Impira and Figma. Recognizing that AI evaluation and observability were recurring pain points, he began speaking with peers and friends to better understand what teams needed to reliably ship AI systems into production.
Since the company’s founding, AI has shifted rapidly from experimentation to mission-critical deployment. Agents are increasingly embedded in core engineering workflows, and both large enterprises and startups are integrating AI directly into customer-facing products. However, as AI systems grow more complex, traditional observability tools have struggled to keep pace.
Modern AI traces often involve long-running, multi-step agents with tool calls and intermediate reasoning, generating large volumes of data over time. According to the company, this complexity has made it harder for teams to predict failures, diagnose issues, and maintain confidence in updates. Braintrust even built its own database technology to handle the scale and intricacy of AI observability.
The company argues that as AI becomes foundational to products and business operations, observability must be treated as core infrastructure. It describes AI as an “operating system” that evolves continuously and often beyond direct human inspection, requiring engineering and product teams to maintain accountability and clarity across deployments.
Braintrust says its platform is already being used by companies including Notion, Replit, Cloudflare, Ramp, and Dropbox, as customers bring AI systems into production at scale.
With the new funding, Braintrust plans to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams, open additional offices, and develop new products. The company also plans to share more updates at its upcoming user conference, Trace.
