Steamship
YC W21 startup providing managed hosting + deployment for LLM agents — 'one-click deploy' for LangChain / agent code. Founded by Ted Benson (ex-Google Brain). Pre-seed + seed funded YC + Twin Ventures. Positioned as Heroku for AI agents — but the agent-platform space crowded post-2023, and Steamship's commercial momentum has slowed vs Vercel AI / Modal / Bedrock.
At a glance
- Type
- Multi-agent deployment / hosting platform (LangChain-like infra)
- Tier
- T3
- Created
- 2021 (YC W21)
- Latest release
- not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
- License
- not applicable — not OSS
- GitHub
- not applicable — no GitHub repo
- Pricing
- Free + paid tiers (per-call + storage)
- Funding
- Seed: YC + Twin Ventures + others (~$3M+ disclosed)
Taxonomy
- storage
- none-trivial
- retrieval
- none
- persistence
- session-only
- update
- agent-controlled
- unit
- turn
- governance
- opaque
- conflict
- out-of-scope
When to use
Optimised for: one-click deployment / hosting for LangChain agents
Anti-fit: not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
Pros & cons
Pros
Early-mover in agent-deployment hosting (Heroku-for-agents); YC backing; LangChain integration native.
Cons
Crowded space — Vercel AI / Modal / Bedrock / Replicate provide alternative paths; small team; limited 2024-25 product velocity vs peers.
Claims & capabilities
YC W21; one-click deploy for LangChain agents; managed hosting + persistent memory tier
Technical surface
- API surface
- not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
- Backend storage
- not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
- Deployment
- not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
- Embedding model
- not applicable — not a memory product
- Multi-tenancy
- not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
- MCP
- not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
- A2A
- not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
- OpenTelemetry
- not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
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Other multi-agent orchestration platforms in the catalog, ranked by inbound references.
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- Burr (DAGWorks) T2
Burr is a state-machine framework for LLM agents from DAGWorks (commercial company behind Hamilton dataflow framework, $4M seed). State-machine abstraction instead of DAG / ReAct — more debuggable for production. Targets the same niche as LangGraph but with state-machine semantics rather than DAG. BSD-3 license. Founded 2023 by ex-Stitch Fix / Two Sigma / Lyft engineers.
- CrewAI Enterprise T2
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- Imbue (formerly Generally Intelligent) T3
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- InstructLab (Red Hat / IBM) T2
Red Hat / IBM-stewarded open-source framework for community-driven LLM alignment + fine-tuning. Method paper 'LAB: Large-Scale Alignment for Chatbots' (Sudalairaj et al, IBM Research 2024). Built on the Granite model family (IBM's open-weights). Apache 2.0. Used in IBM watsonx + Red Hat OpenShift AI for fine-tuning workflows. Not strictly a multi-agent framework — included as 'orchestration platform' because of its role as a substrate for building domain-specific fine-tuned agent models.
- Lindy T2
Lindy is a no-code multi-agent automation platform from Florent Crivello (ex-Teleport, ex-Twitter). Targets consumer / SMB segment with email triage, meeting scheduling, CRM-update agents. $50M Series A Oct-2024 led by Andreessen Horowitz + Sequoia. Distinct from Zapier / n8n traditional automation by putting LLMs at the core of every workflow node.
Related systems
References (1)
- LangChain (framework) depends on at runtime — adjacent-infrastructure cell: LangChain (deep integration); Heroku-style PaaS heritage; YC alumni network