The Acquisition Desk
Helicone Joins Mintlify
After 14 trillion tokens and a million dollars in annual revenue, the open-source observability company signs on to build the context layer for AI agents.
By Justin Torre · Special to the Times · July 2026
SAN FRANCISCO. Helicone, the open-source LLM observability platform founded in the winter of 2023, has joined Mintlify. Justin Torre, its co-founder and chief executive, will lead work on the context layer for AI agents, the infrastructure that decides what an agent knows before it acts.
The numbers from the Helicone run read like a wire report from a faster decade. More than 14 trillion tokens processed. Over 30,000 signups. Some 36 million end users tracked through the platform. 5,200 stars on GitHub, earned one developer at a time, and revenue that crossed $1 million a year.
“Agents are only as good as the context you hand them.”
Helicone began as a single proxy line in front of the OpenAI API and grew into the ledger of record for teams shipping LLM products. Every request, every latency spike, every dollar of spend, written down and queryable. The company came out of Y Combinator's W23 batch and kept its code open the whole way.
At Mintlify, the bet inverts. Observability told you what your model did. Context decides what it will do. Documentation, code, and institutional knowledge become the raw material agents draw on, and somebody has to build the plumbing.
Asked for comment, Torre kept it short. The full statement runs on the wire, one click above this column.