Portkey.ai secures $3 million funding round to help build generative AI apps faster
Wed 23 Aug 2023
Portkey.ai has announced a $3 million 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 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.
The company already serves millions of requests a day for innovative generative AI companies like Postman, Jio Haptik, Springworks, and more through their full stack LLMOps solution.
Rohit Agarwal, Co-founder of Portkey.ai, said: “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 generative AI apps and features with confidence.”
Increasing competition and the viral popularity of ChatGPT is spurring businesses to launch AI apps, but they face time and budget constraints in rolling these out.
An enterprise building generative AI features could use Azure and Llama2 with intelligent routing, which may save over 25% in budget spend with smart caching, and monitor all their requests for accuracy and latency. Building this platform internally would take months of work, various iterations, and requires significant experience with LLMs. Portkey claims it can take two minutes to achieve this with their solutions.
Kartik Mandaville, the CEO of Springworks, recalled how he used Portkey to build an AI-first employee help desk: “While developing Albus, we were handling over 10,000 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 through its 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 have known for the past decade through multiple 0 to 1 journeys.”
Portkey.ai has a global footprint, with a significant user base in the US. In the long run, the company aims to enhance AI application development for its fast-growing customer base.
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 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.
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