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.