Startup raises $30M to show companies if their AI spending pays off

Larridin, a San Francisco startup, raised $30 million to help companies find out whether their AI spending is paying off. Its software studies how employees use AI tools. It then estimates who uses them well, who needs more training and how much time people save.

Why investors are interested

Pelion Ventures led the Series A, an early funding round for a young company. Jeff Kearl, a general partner at Pelion, told Business Insider that AI has gone from a small, even "nonexistent," expense to one of the top five to 10 most expensive items on a company's ledger. Businesses now ask where the money goes and who uses it.

CEO Russell Fradin previously worked at Comscore, a measurement company. He says that when a lot of money moves into a category, someone builds an outside measurement firm for it. Larridin wants to be that firm for AI.

How it works

The software connects to a company's internal systems and analyzes how staff use AI, including the prompts they type. Cofounder and CTO Ameya Kanitkar says it protects privacy by not storing the contents of those interactions. It produces scores and high-level insights instead.

Alex Rampell, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said the product fills a need for a kind of "AI boss." The idea is to check whether people are using AI for the right things and whether results actually improve.

Growth so far

• One enterprise customer in December last year, 50 now.
• Business picked up around the second quarter, when AI costs worried more companies.
• The company has 20 employees and wants to double that, hiring in sales, engineering and marketing.
• Andreessen Horowitz and Gradient Ventures also backed an earlier $17 million seed round.

The backdrop

Early this year, many companies pushed staff to use AI as much as possible. Duolingo even added AI use as a performance measure. In April, Uber's CTO said the company had already used up its yearly Claude Code budget. At least 17 companies announced AI-related layoffs.

By mid-year, big bills changed the mood. Companies began chasing a return on their spending. Some turned to cheaper open-source models from Chinese labs such as Moonshot AI and Z.ai.

What is not known

The material does not say what Larridin costs or show independent proof that it works. The customer numbers and the privacy claims come from the company and its backers.