It was not a fire sale I'm pretty sure. Langfuse has been consistently growing, they publish some stats about sdk usage etc so you can look that up.

They also say in the announcement that they had a term sheet for a good series a.

I think the team just took the chance to exit early before the llm hype crashes down. There is also a question of how big this market really is they mostly do observability for chatbots but there are only so many of those and with other players like openais tracing, pydantic logfire, posthog etc they become more a feature than a product of its own. Without a great distribution system they would eventually fall behind I think.

2 years to a decent exit (probably 100m cash out or so with a good chunk being Clickhouse shares) seems like a good idea rather than betting on that story to continue forever.

Anecdotally, from the AI startup scene in London, I do not know folks who swear by Langfuse. Honestly, evals platforms are still only just starting to catch on. I haven't used any tracing/monitoring tools for LLMs that made me feel like, say, Honeycomb does.