Many large companies want to join the AI revolution, but many believe it is too early to lock into a fundamental model. This means there is a market for a level between companies and Large Language Models (LLMs) — something companies can use to choose LLMs easily without having to commit to one platform forever.
This is the market Langdock it aims with the conversational interface that is between LLM and a company. 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 have vendor lock-in to just one of these LLM providers,” Lennard Schmidt, co-founder and CEO of Langdock, told TechCrunch. “So we kind of stripped that down to 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 use basic models, open source models, or host their own models and make them accessible, Schmidt said.
The funding round also included Y Combinator and some famous German founders, including Rolf Schrömgens (Trivago), Hanno Renner (Personio), Johannes Reck (GetYourGuide) and Erik Muttersbach (Forto), along with around 25 other angel investors.
In particular, there is a European play here: Langdock is “going” on the idea that companies in the EU will want to safely and securely integrate LLMs in a regulatory compliant way.
This means that employees can operate in a slightly more closed environment, allowing them to create, for example, libraries, use more than one LLM and add sensitive documents.
In addition to the chat interface, the company also offers security, cloud and on-premises solutions.
Langdock claims to have many clients including Merck, GetYourGuide, HeyJobs and Forto. Merck released the startup’s interface to its 63,000 employees. Walid Mehanna, head of data and artificial intelligence at Merck, said in a statement: “We are early adopters of GenAI and are seeing a paradigm shift in how the technology can enable our employees to become more effective and efficient in their daily lives professional life”.
Langdock is not the only company involved in this space.
Powder, based in Paris, has raised €5 million to date and is backed by Sequoia. The company is building an interface that companies can use to leverage LLMs for various use cases, including customer service, internal reporting, research and more. Instead, Langdock’s chat interface works for a wider range of use cases and can be used by all kinds of staff.
