Harrison Chase, co-founder and chief executive of LangChain, joins 20VC to explain what building agent infrastructure actually looks like now that frontier models keep absorbing functions startups used to sell. LangChain has raised roughly $160M, most recently at a $1.25B valuation, and says it works with more than a third of the Fortune 500.
The conversation covers where value accrues in the agent stack, whether specialist models beat frontier ones, why the agent memory layer is still unresolved, and what happens to costs when agents generate orders of magnitude more requests than people ever did.