In response to the escalating demand for AI apps, driven in part by the viral success of ChatGPT, businesses are grappling with time and budget constraints while striving to roll out these applications. Addressing this challenge, Portkey.ai has unveiled a $3 million seed funding round, empowering engineering teams to expedite the building and launching of generative AI apps. Rohit Agarwal, Co-founder of Portkey.ai, stated, “Tech chiefs are facing a rush of demand from teams for AI apps that will save money without too much delay. Our vision for Portkey has been to enable teams and companies to deploy Gen AI apps and features with confidence.”

The funding round was led by Lightspeed, with participation from angel investors, including notable figures from AWS, OpenAI, Cloudflare, Postman, and Asana. Founded in January 2023 by Rohit Agarwal and Ayush Garg, Portkey.ai offers tools that enable businesses to monitor their language model operations (LLMOps) efficiently, establish connections to multiple large language models (LLMs), experiment, enhance, and effectively manage prompts.

The company also boasts deep integrations with players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Langchain, LlamaIndex, and more. Through their comprehensive stack LLMOps solution, they currently handle millions of daily requests for innovative Gen AI companies like Postman, Jio Haptik, Springworks, and others. Enterprises seeking to build Gen AI features can leverage Azure & Llama2 with intelligent routing, resulting in over 25% budget savings through smart caching and comprehensive monitoring of accuracy and latency for all requests.

Developing such a platform internally would entail months of work, multiple iterations, and substantial LLM experience. In contrast,Kartik Mandaville, CEO of Springworks, which is constructing an AI-first employee help desk, shared his transformative experience with Portkey, saying, “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.”The newly secured funding will facilitate business scaling (both technology and personnel) and the development of new product capabilities. Dev Khare, Partner at Lightspeed, expressed enthusiasm about partnering with Portkey, highlighting their ability to empower teams creating, deploying, and managing LLM-based applications and copilots for businesses and consumers.

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 garnered a global presence, with a significant user base in the U.S. In the long term, the company aims to enhance AI application development for its rapidly growing customer base.