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- Hacker News
- We use TensorZero as our LLM Gateway and prompt evaluation platform. I would think a model-neutral prompt evaluation platform is still largely needed. Therefore I think we should somehow continue its life as a community project (TensorOne would be a good name).by starsang
- Most VCs avoided application layer believing it is too risky with few player would emerge as winner over application layers calling them GPT wrapper (now called Harness) and pouring money into infra layer. Would love to see your opinion about how this thesis would turn out going forward.by hek2sch
- Your post title is misleading and false. They didn't archive overnight, they raised the money last year, the founder explains in comments.by onel
- Not my experience. I think most VCs thesis is around the application layer - not much around the infrastructure.
That being said, while I am biased, there is a lot of work around infrastructure so calling it "just a wrapper" massively underestimates the effort - this is purely from my own experience building this space.
Besides, if it is true how come OpenClaw is spending so much money on a open source project. Salaries alone will cost 7 digit sum for a harness and I have first hand experience dealing with companies doing exactly this.
Shameful plug - we are building cbk.ai, better known today as chatbotkit.com.
by _pdp_ - There was a high severity advisory last week https://github.com/tensorzero/tensorzero/security/advisories... though these days can't even tell if this is related or just routineby hmokiguess
- This was coincidental. Someone reported the issue last week, we fixed it, and published the advisory.
- For people like myself, who didn't understand the timing of events - raised in august 2025, archived yesterday without any notice.by MonstraG
- Seed was in Aug ‘25 and website simply says the project will no longer be maintained: https://www.tensorzero.com/by bz_bz_bz
- Obviously they upgraded, bought a dash, and moved on to https://www.tensor-one.com/by DonHopkins
- Seed was in '24 actually but we only announced in '25.
- This is the claim in the repo readme that presumably unlocked the VC investment:
“TensorZero is used by companies ranging from frontier AI startups to the Fortune 10 and fuels ~1% of global LLM API spend today.”
One percent seems like a lot. Anyone on HN use this?
by pavlov - Just tell AI to write your copy and that's what you get, overhype-as-a-service.by ojosilva
- Rounded to the nearest percent >0by croes
- Generally speaking, every YC company post ~2020 is forced to make pathologically false claims to compete in the (fundraising) market.by sebmellen
- I used it, but only briefly to evaluate it. It had some overlap with a tool I built myself, was curious if any of the extra features would be useful.
Ultimately I found the data model and UI to be both cumbersome and unintuitive. Langfuse ended up being the observability tool I went with instead over the one I built (and still use today).
by spmurrayzzz - We raised most of the capital before we had any traction. We raised on a rolling basis and had millions in the bank before we had even published the open-source repository. Ultimately we raised based on the team's background + vision.
The ~1% figure might be outdated today but it was a best-effort estimate a couple of months ago. TensorZero powered tens of trillions of inference tokens per month. TensorZero is not widely used but it was used by a couple of extreme-scale users.
- VCs think, 'Apps are risky, infrastructure is safe,' so they invested in AI infra.
"infra is safe" Hmm, but that wasn't a good idea. because if an open source infrastructure project like TensorZero gets shut down this quickly, won't they start to realize that those investment theories are also risky?
The difficult thing about AI infrastructure is that, unlike other industries, it will not become fragmented. It will likely remain tied to specific big tech models. What does this mean? It means that because AI models are not yet standardized, the infrastructure itself is actually riskier. In other words, the privatization of standards is happening.
The challenge with AI infrastructure is that an independent, stable standard layer has not formed, unlike in other software infrastructure markets such as databases, web servers, cloud, and containers. Over time, those ecosystems developed relatively standardized interfaces and operational layers. But the LLM ecosystem is still evolving rapidly. Models themselves change fast, APIs differ, pricing differs, context windows, tool calling, structured output, evaluation, fine tuning, caching, routing, everything keeps changing.
So even if an infrastructure startup tries to build a common abstraction layer across multiple models, before that common layer can stabilize, big model or cloud providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, AWS, or Azure can just absorb the same functionality directly. In the end, AI infrastructure is at high risk of becoming an attached feature of model providers rather than solidifying as an independent layer.
But if a startup that raised 7.3 million dollars fails this quickly, who would trust and invest in such things? That aside, it seems AI startups are all the rage these days. I also want to learn AI and get funded like that. Does anyone here trust me enough to invest? About one hundredth of that would probably be enough
by jdw64 - > VCs think, 'Apps are risky, infrastructure is safe,' so they invested in AI infra.
I think you're really overgeneralizing what "infrastructure" means in this case.
- Tell me you haven't talked to a VC.
A better model for VCs is: companies are finding tons of budget to allocate to new AI spend. Besides the labs, who is going to be able to capture some of that spend while they're actively looking to spend it?
Nobody at the seed stage is investing in things they think are "safe". They are investing in things they think have huge upside.
by Eridrus - Our investors aren't looking for safe, they're looking for a small chance in funding the next Databricks or similar. Most times it doesn't work out unfortunately, but that's part of the game.
(Also, we raised the capital in 2024 and didn't burn most of it.)
- Infra is perhaps somewhat safe but realistically it's a really low margin capital intense business long-term unless you can lock-in customers with hundreds of services like AWS. So not a lot of space for a huge ROI.
> are all the rage these days
Are they? Overall it seems kind of tame compared to 2020-21 since VCs are somewhat risk average outside of a few outliers. Funding looks much more concentrated these days.
by pqtyw - A few comments.
> VCs think, 'Apps are risky, infrastructure is safe,' so they invested in AI infra.
First off, this isn't even infra in the infra sense of the word. Infrastructure implied something physical, a pure software product can almost never be considered 'infra'. A tool maybe, but not 'infra'.
VCs can also be irrational and driven primarily by personal connections rather than reason. I didn't do a deep dive in this project/leadership, but often who you know is some important than what you produced. There's a reason why a lot of VCs go for the old motto of "I'd rather invest in an A team with a C product; than invest in a C team with an A product".
by rfgplk - I also believe the same. Many VCs are obsessed with moat that they clearly got wrong. To me the value created at app layers are so much that gives them the flexibility to diversify their infra layers. Good harnessed do not depend on a specific model provider or memory layer or etc that when it is taken down like anthropic fable they get no risk exposure. Many even after growing train their own model like what cursor did with composer. There’s many more examples in other verticals like manus, superhuman, fireflies, lovable, replit, cursor, nouswise, cline windsurf and kilo but many are concentrated in coding because again I think VCs have preferred this definition of moat.by realsarm
- I've forked this and will be updating and fixing issues going forward.
https://github.com/agentify-sh/gateway
For now I will just open this up to see if there is any interest if so I would be spending whatever free time I get to fix issues and open it up to other contributors so we can keep going.
I think its important to have an LLM gateway tool like this to remain open source.
by agentifysh - Just use Plexus [1]. The maintainer is not trying to be a hero or raise seed dollars or even really trying to promote it. He's just making an excellent, useful product. (Unaffiliated, just a happy user). It's not a full-on "LLMOps" platform (whatever that is), it's just a proxy that works very well and has some nice features.by indigodaddy
- Thanks! That's exactly what we need for our 6 ppl team.by SeriousM
- About one year ago, I created an LLM gateway with metrics, provider fallback and switching, tools support, injecting, etc. etc., and unique features like acting as an MCP tools client and server, all streamed, with low latency.
It was a simple project in terms of technical complexity. I didn't publish it as I counted several similar projects in the field.
Putting $7.3M into such a project would make sense only in the case of a precise growth plan with already declared customers and an promising sales funnel. There is no technical moat.
by kmac_ - That's literally every project around AI. All the agent sandboxes. Hosting cron jobs that just hit ai rest endpoints for model completions etcby zackify
- The calculus in “buy or build” has shifted for me over the last six months especially. If I can make an agent build it, I get the version that’s tailored for me.
> It was a simple project in terms of technical complexity.
That’s the thing, though. The version I build for myself sheds all the features that get in my way. I don’t share them either because they’re only useful for me.
Perhaps in the future big tech projects will be delivered with a common “core” and the expectation that agents fill in the use-specific stuff.
by jnovek - The title makes it sound like they just did a seed round, but the seed round was announced in August of last year [0].
Their website landing page is now also showing the software is no longer maintained. No mention of why they made this decision, my best guess is they burned through their seed money and were unable to attract further investments.
[0]: https://www.tensorzero.com/blog/tensorzero-raises-7-3m-seed-...
by LeonM