Larridin raises $30M to show companies what their AI spending buys

Larridin, a San Francisco startup that measures what companies get back from AI, has raised $30 million. Pelion Ventures led the Series A round, the company said in a statement on Monday.

Andreessen Horowitz and Gradient Ventures, which backed Larridin’s $17 million seed round, invested again. GFT, W23, Thayer, DG Daiwa Ventures, Alumni Ventures and Cougar Capital joined as new investors. Larridin has now raised $47 million in total.

Larridin went from one enterprise customer last December to 50 now, chief executive Russ Fradin told Business Insider’s Aditi Bharade. He said business picked up in the second quarter, when more companies began to worry about AI costs. He plans to double the 20-person team.

Who spends what on AI

Larridin’s software links a company’s AI tools, usage and bills to the work its people and AI agents produce. It aims to show where AI pays off, where to invest and which workflows to automate next. Customers include SurveyMonkey, Vertiv, Klaviyo, Gainsight, EcoVadis and Sundt.

The company said it has measured more than 2 billion AI sessions and tracked more than 82,000 workflows. Across its customers, it reports a 47% average rise in measurable team output. It also reports a median $2.4 million of AI spending optimised in the first year. Those figures are Larridin’s own.

At one customer, 92% of engineers used AI. Yet one engineer ran up roughly 65% of the team’s AI bill in a single week, Larridin said. At another, two AI tools doing comparable work differed 66 times in cost per shipped change.

Chief technology officer Ameya Kanitkar told Business Insider that the platform analyses employees’ AI interactions without storing their contents. It produces scores and high-level insights instead.

A Comscore for AI

Fradin and his co-founder Jim Larrison both worked at Comscore, the media measurement company. Fradin said that when a lot of money moves into a category, someone builds an independent company to measure it. Larridin wants to be that company for AI.

Jeff Kearl is the Pelion general partner who led the round. He told Business Insider that AI has gone from a tiny expense to one of the five to ten biggest items on company ledgers.

“All of a sudden they’re like, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of money going to AI,’” Kearl said.

More code, slower reviews

Larridin also launched a quarterly Engineering AI Impact Report. It draws on data from more than 1,000 engineers at its customers. AI-assisted pull requests rose from 35% in April to 62% in September. Over the same period, the median wait for a first human code review grew by 50%, the report found.

Elsewhere, Amazon has warned its engineers against ‘tokenmaxxing’, and BNY now tracks its token spending. On Sunday, Elon Musk said Grok Bot’s serving costs were unsustainably high relative to revenue.