Freeplay: Empowering the Next Wave of AI Product Builders
At Renegade, we love backing experienced teams who clearly see where a rapidly changing world is heading. Today, we’re thrilled to announce our latest investment in Freeplay, the platform for AI teams to build great products and agents.
We led Freeplay’s $5.6M seed round, with participation from Conviction, Matchstick, Next Frontier, PWV (led by Tom Preston-Werner), Vermillion Cliffs, and a crew of all-star angels with backgrounds at GitHub, Dropbox, Atlassian, Scale AI, and more, bringing Freeplay’s total funding to $8.9M. Alongside this investment, Freeplay announced the GA of their self-serve platform, enabling development teams everywhere to discover a better way to run evals, prompt experiments, and observe their AI systems.
Freeplay provides the complete platform for AI teams to manage prompts and models, run evaluations, launch experiments, and monitor production AI systems. Their tools help AI teams get to market and improve their products faster, and ultimately give them the confidence to trust the quality of their AI outputs to customers.
AI product development is significantly different from traditional software. It requires constant monitoring and experimentation. And in many cases, the people best suited to evaluate and improve the quality of AI systems are domain experts without engineering experience. Freeplay gives development teams a modern toolset and workflows allowing everyone involved in AI product development to collaborate - empowering engineers, product managers, designers, and other domain experts alike. Just as Figma revolutionized design collaboration, Freeplay is doing the same for prompt engineering, evaluation, and AI development - recognizing that prompts are the new code and need their own tooling.
Co-Founders of Freeplay, Eric Ryan and Ian Cairns.
Purpose Driven
Ian Cairns and Eric Ryan impressed us immediately. Their decade-long partnership, forged in the trenches building business-critical developer tools together, gives them unmatched expertise. Ian and Eric previously led product and engineering for Twitter’s developer platform, including the Twitter API and its enterprise data licensing business. At Freeplay, they’re once again equipping other builders to innovate, this time in AI.
Building a Compounding Advantage
For Freeplay’s customers, the true advantage comes from building the data flywheel for continuous product optimization. AI models change constantly, and every team is always wanting to try new techniques. They need a way to quickly understand how their systems behave at scale, iterate, test, learn about changes, and then repeat the cycle. And as AI turns English into the most popular programming language, it’s become critical to democratize evals, testing, and product improvements so that changes can come not only from developers, but also product managers, designers, and subject matter experts.
The net effect is that Freeplay removes experimentation and iteration bottlenecks and helps teams get to market and deliver value to customers faster.
Customers already feel the difference. “As soon as we integrated Freeplay, our pace of iteration and efficiency jumped – easily a 10× change,” said CEO Michael Ducker. “Now everyone on the team participates in updating prompts, editing them, and switching models.”
Attacking a Market at a Tipping Point
Every software company is swiftly becoming an AI company. Developing agents and other products around LLMs is thrilling... and chaotic, with outputs that don’t neatly fit testing frameworks designed for code. Existing tools were not built for the LLM paradigm, leaving teams to patch together internal solutions, use developer-only tooling, or cross their fingers and hope. This is where Freeplay shines, providing a structured and scalable approach built specifically for the challenges and realities of AI products. Their self-serve platform allows any team to reliably develop and ship production-grade AI-powered experiences.
Companies ranging from Fortune 100s to early-stage startups rely on Freeplay including Chime, Help Scout, Maze, Raptive, Stackhawk, and many more. And with strong net revenue retention and high DAU/WAU engagement, it’s clear the customer love runs deep.
Ian Chan, VP of Engineering at Postscript, sums it up: “Freeplay transformed black-box 'vibe-prompting' into a testable workflow for our AI team. Today we ship AI features with real confidence.”
With this new capital, Freeplay will expand go-to-market, build their team, and accelerate their vision of using AI to help teams build AI - automating more of the evaluation, testing and observability workflows that lead to better products for AI builders.
At Renegade, we build a focused portfolio, bet early with unshakeable conviction, and work side-by-side with ambitious founders to help startups become enduring companies.
Ian, Eric, and the Freeplay team: thanks for inviting us along. You’re building the infrastructure for tomorrow's software. We're thrilled to be on the journey with you.
We partner with founders pushing to transform industries. If that's you, let's talk: hi@renegadepartners.com.