Ankur Goyal

Ankur Goyal is founder and CEO of Braintrust, an AI product platform focused on evals, tracing, and shipping reliable LLM apps. He started Braintrust in 2023 after founding Impira and leading machine learning work at Figma following Impira's acquisition.

MemSQL dropout to Impira

Goyal studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon, then left undergrad to join the founding team at MemSQL (now SingleStore), later becoming VP of Engineering. In a First Round podcast he described that leap as formative: he wanted to learn from builders who were already talking to demanding customers. He founded Impira in 2017 to help teams search and analyze unstructured documents and media; Figma acquired Impira, and he went on to lead Figma's ML platform.

Why evals became the next company

He has said he was not hunting for another startup after the acquisition. What changed was the eval problem. At Impira, and again at Figma, teams adopting language models lacked a rigorous way to measure whether model changes helped or hurt. In the First Round conversation he ties Braintrust directly to that gap: the same failure modes kept showing up, so he built tooling for evals, production tracing, and regression detection.

On high-bar users

Goyal's public product stance is that AI teams need the same engineering discipline they already apply to software: score quality, catch regressions, and ship with evidence. Braintrust positions itself as that loop for LLM applications rather than a one-off notebook of prompts.