Many large companies want to join the AI revolution, but many believe it’s too early to lock themselves into one fundamental model. This means there is a market for a layer between businesses and large language models (LLMs) – something businesses can use to easily select LLMs without needing to commit to one platform forever .
This is the market that Langdock is targeting with its chat interface which sits between LLMs and a business. Based in Germany, the startup recently raised a $3 million seed round led by General Catalyst and its European seed-stage partner, La Famiglia.
“Companies don’t want to be dependent on just one of these LLM providers,” Lennard Schmidt, co-founder and CEO of Langdock, told TechCrunch. “So we’ve sort of boiled that down into an interface that allows a company to choose which of the underlying models from different vendors can be used by employees.”
Langdock’s chat interface allows companies to leverage foundational models, open source models or host their own models and make them accessible, Schmidt said.
The funding round also saw participation from Y Combinator and some high-profile German founders, including Rolf Schrömgens (Trivago), Hanno Renner (Personio), Johannes Reck (GetYourGuide) and Erik Muttersbach (Forto), as well as around 25 other angel investors.
In particular, there is a European play here: Langdock “leans heavily” on the idea that EU companies will want to integrate LLMs safely and in a regulatory-compliant manner.
This means employees can work in a slightly more closed environment, allowing them to, for example, create libraries of prompts, use multiple LLMs, and add sensitive documents.
In addition to the chat interface, the company also offers security, cloud and on-premises solutions.
Langdock claims to have a number of clients, including Merck, GetYourGuide, HeyJobs and Forto. Merck has deployed the startup’s interface to its 63,000 employees. Walid Mehanna, head of data and AI at Merck, said in a statement: “We are early adopters of GenAI and are seeing a paradigm shift in how technology can enable our employees to become more effective in their daily professional life. »
Langdock isn’t the only company tackling this space.
Dust, based in Paris, has raised 5 million euros to date and is supported by Sequoia. The company is building an interface that businesses can use to leverage LLMs for various use cases such as customer service, internal reporting, research, and more. In contrast, Langdock’s chat interface works for a wider range of use cases and can be used by any type of staff.
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