# Ankur Goyal

> Ankur Goyal is the Founder & CEO of Braintrust, a San Francisco-based AI evaluation and observability platform that helps engineering teams ship reliable AI products. Previously VP of Engineering at SingleStore (MemSQL) and founder of Impira (acquired by Figma in 2022), Goyal brings over a decade of distributed systems and ML infrastructure experience to the challenge of making AI applications production-ready. Braintrust has raised $121M in total funding, including an $80M Series B at an $800M valuation in February 2026, backed by ICONIQ Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and a roster of elite angels including Greg Brockman and Elad Gil.

- **Role:** Founder & CEO at Braintrust
- **Organizations:** Braintrust, SingleStore (MemSQL), Impira, Figma, Carnegie Mellon University
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** Computer Science (did not complete - left to join MemSQL founding team), Carnegie Mellon University
- **Known for:** Founded and sold Impira to Figma (2022), VP of Engineering at SingleStore - helped scale one of the fastest distributed databases in the world, Built Braintrust to $121M in total funding and $800M valuation within 3 years of founding

## Career timeline

- **2011** — Joined SingleStore (then MemSQL) as one of first employees; left CMU to pursue the opportunity
- **2011-2019** — Rose to VP of Engineering at SingleStore; led distributed in-memory database engineering and horizontal scale-out capabilities
- **2016** — Interviewed as VP of Engineering at MemSQL, sharing insights on distributed systems and database architecture
- **2019** — Founded Impira, an AI-powered document extraction and data management platform
- **2022** — Impira acquired by Figma in December 2022
- **2022-2023** — Led AI/ML Platform team at Figma as Head of ML Platform; encountered the AI evaluation problem firsthand
- **2023** — Founded Braintrust to solve the AI evaluation and observability problem
- **2024** — Braintrust raises $36M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z); Zapier among first enterprise customers
- **2026-02** — Braintrust raises $80M Series B at $800M valuation, led by ICONIQ Capital

## Achievements

- Founded and sold Impira to Figma (2022)
- VP of Engineering at SingleStore - helped scale one of the fastest distributed databases in the world
- Built Braintrust to $121M in total funding and $800M valuation within 3 years of founding
- Attracted enterprise customers including Notion, Stripe, Vercel, Airtable, Cloudflare, Dropbox, Ramp, Instacart
- Secured backing from Greg Brockman (OpenAI), Elad Gil, Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Simon Last (Notion), Bryan Helmig (Zapier), Arthur Mensch (Mistral)
- Contributions to open source: DuckDB (core planner and cast functions), Hugging Face Transformers
- Series B lead by ICONIQ Capital with board seat appointment (Matt Jacobson), alongside a16z and Greylock

## Latest updates

- **2026-02** — Braintrust raises $80M Series B at $800M valuation, led by ICONIQ Capital with Matt Jacobson joining the board
- **2025-06** — Featured on Software Engineering Daily discussing the challenge of AI model evaluations
- **2025** — Launched 'Loop' - an AI assistant that analyzes traces and suggests better prompts, scorers, and datasets
- **2025** — Expanded enterprise customer base to include Stripe, Cloudflare, Dropbox, Ramp
- **2024-10** — Raised $36M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz at ~$150M valuation

## Links

- Website: https://braintrust.dev
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankrgyl/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/ankrgyl
- GitHub: https://github.com/ankrgyl

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/ankur-goyal
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-27