Braintrust CEO Ankur Goyal says his team can make it easier for "anyone" to build software that makes use of AI.

Three months after a tech company releases new software utilizing artificial intelligence, Ankur Goyal’s team usually gets the call for help. As more users try the company’s shiny new AI tools, complaints that it provides nonsensical answers follow close behind.

“People are good at predicting what people will need an AI tool for. The hard part is that if you just type something up and ship it, it doesn’t work,” Goyal said. “It’s like baking without measuring the ingredients: you end up with mush.”

Goyal’s startup, Braintrust, caters to that challenge. Its software evaluates and monitors how an AI product is performing, then helps pinpoint the problem when something breaks. Bake in Braintrust for just a few weeks, and companies typically see their AI products’ self-reported accuracy – how it scores on a test such as for factual accuracy – soar from below 40% to north of 80%, Goyal claimed.

Just a year old, Braintrust is already used by several unicorns, including Airtable, Brex, Instacart and Stripe. The company’s dozens of customers, a group that have doubled in the past three months, Goyal said, typically pay tens of thousands of dollars and sometimes more than $100,000. Now, Braintrust has raised $36 million in a Series A round led by a16z partner Martin Casado to reach more companies beyond the Silicon Valley bubble.

The funding values the San Francisco-based startup at about $150 million, according to a source with knowledge. Braintrust and a16z declined to comment on the valuation. Cloud leaders Databricks and Datadog also joined the round.

Braintrust works by providing a software development kit, or SDK, for a business to operate within its own IT infrastructure. At first, AI early adopters like........

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