What deepset does
deepset builds Haystack, one of the most widely used open-source frameworks for building production LLM applications, and deepset Cloud, an enterprise platform that turns Haystack pipelines into managed, observable, and governable AI workflows. Haystack supports retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), conversational agents, document search, and complex multi-step pipelines across any LLM provider — OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Llama, AWS Bedrock, Azure, and more. The framework has tens of thousands of GitHub stars and millions of downloads, and Haystack 2.0 was released in early 2024 with a modular component architecture purpose-built for agentic workflows.
deepset Cloud adds prompt management, evaluation, monitoring, role-based access control, and one-click deployments on top of Haystack, plus enterprise features like VPC isolation, SSO, and data residency. The product is used by Fortune 500 companies including Airbus, Bayer, and Deutsche Telekom for internal RAG, knowledge agents, and customer-facing copilots.
Who it's for
deepset targets enterprise AI and data teams building production LLM applications, particularly in regulated industries like finance, manufacturing, telecom, and pharma where governance, on-premise deployment, and audit trails matter more than developer experience alone.
Pricing
Haystack is free and open-source under the Apache 2.0 license. deepset Cloud is sold via custom enterprise pricing with no public list price, plus a self-serve tier for smaller teams.
Team & funding
deepset was founded in 2018 in Berlin by Milos Rusic (CEO), Malte Pietsch (CTO), and Timo Möller (Chief Research Officer). The company has raised $45.6M total across three rounds: a $1.6M seed in 2020, a $14M Series A in April 2022 led by GV (Google Ventures), and a $30M Series B in August 2023 led by Balderton Capital with participation from GV, Harpoon Ventures, and System.One. deepset was named a Gartner Cool Vendor in AI Engineering in 2024 and announced partnerships with Meta Llama Stack, MongoDB, NVIDIA, and AWS in 2025.
Position vs competitors
deepset competes with LangChain (LangSmith), LlamaIndex, and proprietary enterprise LLM platforms from cloud vendors. Its bet is that European-grounded data governance plus a mature, modular open-source framework wins in the enterprise.