Sequoia backs Pydantic to expand beyond its open source data-validation framework
A U.K.-based, open-source startup is launching its first commercial product with the backing of one of Silicon Valley’s most renowned venture capital firms.
Pydantic on Monday launched an observability platform called Logfire, five months after trialing it in open beta, and announced $12.5 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia.
However, the company is better known for its eponymous Python library and open source data-validation framework, started by U.K developer Samuel Colvin back in 2017. The project has gone from strength to strength, and is now used by developers at some of the world’s biggest companies including Meta, Nvidia, Netflix, Google and OpenAI.
Companies deploy Pydantic within applications that need to verify the type of data a user has entered — if a form requires an email address and the user instead inputs a phone number or leaves it blank, Pydantic checks this and delivers a user-friendly error message. It basically validates data structures to ensure integrity and has myriad use-cases.
For example, ChatGPT maker OpenAI introduced structured outputs for its API in August, and this feature uses Pydantic under the hood. So if a company wants to develop a chatbot that collects user details and returns them in a structured manner so the data can be easily processed by the system, it would use Pydantic.
