How did we get here?
Langfuse has grown a lot over the last few years. This is a high-level overview of how we got here.
Milestones
2022: Founders start working together
We (Marc, Max and Clemens) got started working together in 2022. We explored different ideas and built a usage-based billing product (named Finto) to solve problems we had encountered in previous roles.
With an initial product and customers, we got accepted to YC W23 in November 2022.
Jan-Apr 2023: Building AI applications in YC W23
We moved to San Francisco for the YC W23 batch. While our customers were excited about Finto (the billing product), we were ultimately striving to build the nth generation of product in an established (limited) market.
Given progress in LLMs and we realized that there are much bigger / more exciting problems to solve in completely new and large markets.
We used most of the YC Batch to work on all sorts of AI application ideas, including:
- Learn from AI: Educational courses on any topic
- Sales data enrichment via LLM-based web research
- Collaborative LLM-agnostic ChatGPT for teams
- LLM-created PRs for any GitHub issue assigned to our bot
While going through these products (usually < 2 weeks each), we learned:
- There are so many use cases for the technology, building startups is less about validating a problem / pain point and more about demonstrating that you can build an AI-enabled product that solves it. Lot’s of companies want to try and are willing to pay for AI products given the high returns.
- We want to work on a problem where we deeply care about the users
- Building LLM applications is hard, many disregarded them as GPT-wrappers but they are core to the value creation and don’t just work but needed methodical evaluation and iteration
The last point was reconfirmed every week when meeting with other YC founders who tried hard to make their products work to win customers.
May - Aug 2023: Langfuse v0.x and public launch
This realization let us to finally focus on building open-source tooling for LLM application developers (see why do we exist?) as it seemed to be the much bigger problem and solving it would have an outsized impact by helping more teams to build better LLM applications.
We built an initial version and had our first customers in the YC batch. It was exciting to see how much time these early customers spent in-product to iterate and test their applications + how much feedback and referrals to other teams we got from them.
We ended up launching Langfuse publicly as Product Analytics for LLM Apps in July/August 2023:
- Show HN
- Launch YC
- Product Hunt (Product of the Day, Golden Kitty Award)
Sep 2023: $4M Seed led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, La Famiglia and Y Combinator
Todo, learn more here
Nov 2023: Langfuse v1
Todo
Jan 2024: Launch of Prompt Management
Todo
Apr 2024: Launch Week 1
Todo, learn more here
Nov 2024: Launch Week 2
Todo, learn more here
May 2025: Launch Week 3
Todo, learn more here
Community Metrics
Where are we headed?
- Short term: Roadmap
- Long term: Why does Langfuse exist?