The surge in competition and the widespread popularity of ChatGPT are driving businesses to develop AI applications. However, they encounter challenges due to limitations in both time and budget when it comes to deploying these applications. Helping businesses solve this bottleneck, US-based Portkey.ai has snapped $3 million in seed funding.
The funding round was led by Lightspeed (that backed Wondermind, Zluri and Mistral AI) with participation from angel investors, including prominent figures from AWS, OpenAI, Cloudflare, Postman, and Asana.
This fresh round of investment will help Portkey.ai enable tech teams to fast-track the build and deployment of generative AI apps in as little as two minutes. It will also scale the business and expand its team while building new product capabilities.
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.”
Kartik Mandaville, the CEO of Springworks that’s building an AI-first employee help desk recalls his transformative journey with Portkey said: “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.”
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.”
Faster creation of AI apps
Portkey.ai was founded by Rohit Agarwal and Ayush Garg earlier this year. 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. Already, it serves millions of requests a day for innovative Gen AI companies like Postman, Jio Haptik, Springworks, and more through their full-stack LLMOps solution.
An enterprise building Gen AI features could use Azure & Llama2 with intelligent routing, save over 25% of the budget spent 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 is faster.
