Portkey.ai has
announced a $3m seed funding round empowering engineering teams to build and
launch generative AI apps faster.
The funding
round was led by Lightspeed with participation from angel investors, including
prominent figures from AWS, OpenAI, Cloudflare, Postman, and Asana. Portkey.ai
was founded in January 2023 by Rohit Agarwal and Ayush Garg. Both founders had
worked closely together on product development and go-to-market for the AI
products built on top of LLMs.
Portkey.ai
has built tools that allow businesses to monitor their language model
operations (LLMOps), connect to multiple large language models (LLMs)
efficiently, experiment, improve, and manage prompts effectively. It also
offers deep integrations with players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Langchain,
LlamaIndex and more. They already serve millions of requests a day for
innovative Gen AI companies like Postman, Jio Haptik, Springworks and more
through their full-stack LLMOps solution.
Rohit Agarwal, Co-founder, Portkey.ai commented: "Tech
chiefs are facing a rush of demand from teams for AI apps that will save money
without too much delay. But they cannot say yes to all their requests. There’s
so much work to be done that there are often competing priorities and Portkey
wants to help solve these dilemmas for tech teams. Our vision for Portkey has
been to enable teams and companies to deploy Gen AI apps and features with
confidence.”
An enterprise
building Gen AI features could use Azure & Llama2 with intelligent routing,
save over 25% in budget spend with smart caching, and monitor all their
requests for accuracy & latency. Building this platform internally would
take months of work, various iterations and requires significant experience
with LLMs, while getting all this ready with Portkey takes 2 minutes.
Kartik Mandaville, the CEO of Springworks that’s building an AI-first employee help desk
recalls his transformative journey with Portkey, "While developing Albus, we were handling over 10K questions
daily. The challenges of managing costs, latency, and rate limiting on OpenAI
were becoming overwhelming. It was then that Portkey intervened, providing
invaluable support through its analytics and semantic caching solutions."
Portkey.ai
will use the fresh funding to scale the business (tech and people) while
building new product capabilities. Dev
Khare, Partner at Lightspeed, said “We are excited to partner with
Portkey, as they supercharge teams developing, deploying and managing LLM-based
applications and copilots for businesses and consumers. We are equally
excited by the founding team of Rohit and Ayush whom we've known for the past
decade through multiple 0 to 1 journeys.”
Angel investor Sanjeev Sisodiya added: "We
invested in Portkey as the team comes from a very small group of folks who’ve
deployed and scaled LLM applications in production. They understand the
challenges and opportunities in this critical area and I can't wait to see them
bring this capability to the world's software teams."
Portkey.ai
has a global footprint, with a significant user base in the U.S. In the long
run, the company aims to enhance AI application development for its
fast-growing customer base.