Harrison Chase

Co-founder and CEO of LangChain

Harrison Chase is the co-founder and chief executive of LangChain, which describes itself as an open agent engineering platform. Its stated mission is to enable every company to own its intelligence, helping organizations control and adapt their own AI agents to their workflows, data and tools.^[1][2]

LangChain says it works with 35 percent of the Fortune 500, that its open-source projects have passed 1 billion downloads, and that LangSmith ingests more than 1 billion events a day. The company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Boston and Amsterdam.^[2]

Background

Speaker biographies for San Francisco and DockerCon events say Chase studied statistics and computer science at Harvard. He led the entity-linking team at the fintech startup Kensho and then led the machine-learning team at Robust Intelligence, an MLOps company focused on testing and validating models.^[3][4]

LangChain's site says the project began in late 2022 as his side project, a single Python package shared from a personal GitHub account. Wikipedia dates the open-source launch to October 2022, when Chase was still at Robust Intelligence.^[2][5]

From open source to a company

After ChatGPT launched, Chase and co-founder Ankush Gola formed the company in early 2023. Wikipedia says it incorporated in April 2023 and raised more than $20 million from Sequoia Capital at a valuation of at least $200 million, about a week after a $10 million seed round from Benchmark.^[1][2][5]

Wikipedia dates LangChain Expression Language to the third quarter of 2023, LangServe to October 2023, and LangSmith, a closed-source observability and evaluation platform, to February 2024. LangGraph Platform became generally available on May 14, 2025, and LangChain 1.0 followed on October 22, 2025.^[5]

Funding and customers

A $25 million Series A led by Sequoia came in February 2024. In October 2025 LangChain announced a $125 million Series B at a $1.25 billion valuation led by IVP, with Sequoia and Benchmark participating alongside new investors including CapitalG, Sapphire Ventures, ServiceNow Ventures, Workday Ventures, Cisco Investments, Datadog, Databricks and Frontline, Fortune reported.^[1][5]

Fortune named Cisco, Replit, Clay, Cloudflare, Workday and ServiceNow among customers. The company would not disclose financials; a TechCrunch estimate from July 2025 put annual recurring revenue at $12 million to $16 million, which a company spokesperson called low for where it stood. Fortune says it is not profitable but spends relatively efficiently.^[1]

Wikipedia notes that LangChain was featured on the Forbes AI 50 list in April 2025.^[5]

How he describes the market

Chase told Fortune that agents are easy to prototype but hard to ship, and that building reliable ones remains difficult. He argued that LangChain's breadth and neutrality help it in a crowded market, saying it faces many competitors yet effectively has none, and he expects most enterprises to use several agent platforms, with many, such as ServiceNow, running on LangChain underneath.^[1]

Interrupt and public talks

LangChain's agent conference, Interrupt, drew about 800 attendees in its first edition. For 2026, the company said Chase would open each day of the San Francisco event on May 13 and 14 with a keynote on lessons from thousands of teams shipping agents, the product roadmap and industry predictions, and would hold a fireside chat with MongoDB CEO Chirantan Desai. Speakers announced included Andrew Ng and Aaron Levie, and the program featured production stories from Lyft, LinkedIn, Toyota and others.^[6]

Why he matters

Chase turned a widely copied open-source library into one of the defining companies of the first wave of LLM application tooling, and has repositioned it from chains of prompts toward agent engineering: orchestration, observability, evaluation and deployment. His central bet is that the harder problem is shipping agents reliably, not prototyping them.^[1][2][5]

On The Executive List

Harrison Chase is ranked No. 48 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Technology Officers discipline. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.