Helicone

Helicone is an open-source observability platform for Large Language Models (LLMs), founded in 2023 by Justin Torre, Scott Nguyen, and Cole Gottdank. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, the company emerged from Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch (YC W23) and has quickly established itself as a leading solution for developers building AI applications.

The platform provides comprehensive monitoring and debugging capabilities for LLM applications, enabling developers to track performance, costs, latency, and user interaction metrics across multiple providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and LangChain. Helicone's core value proposition is simplicity - developers can integrate the platform with just a single line of code to gain full observability into their AI applications.

Since its launch, Helicone has processed over 2.1 billion requests and supports more than 800 companies in production daily. The platform offers routing and monitoring capabilities, prompt analytics, cost tracking, and access to over 100 AI models through a unified gateway. As an open-source project, Helicone benefits from community contributions while offering enterprise-grade features for larger organizations.

The company operates in the rapidly growing LLM observability market, which has become essential as enterprises increasingly deploy AI applications at scale. Helicone competes with tools like LangSmith, Weights & Biases, and other AI observability platforms, differentiating through its open-source approach and developer-first design philosophy.