Language model ops startup Portkey.ai raises $3 million in funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Language model operations (LLMOps) startup Portkey.ai on Wednesday said it has raised $3 million in a seed funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company has tools that allow businesses to monitor their LLMOps, connect to multiple LLMs to experiment, improve and manage prompts effectively.

Portkey.ai offers integrations with LLMs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Langchain, LlamaIndex, among others.

It serves millions of requests a day for innovative generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies such as Postman, Jio Haptik and Springworks.

Other investors in the round included senior executives from OpenAI, Cloudflare, Postman and Asana, as per a statement. The company was founded in January 2023 by Rohit Agarwal and Ayush Garg.

The startup said it will use the new funds to continue research and build out its large language model (LLM) ops stack, including areas of real-time canary testing for continuous evaluation of models and prompts, and fine-tuning models.

These are areas in which Portkey.ai plans to release new products in the near future.
The cofounders – Agarwal and Garg – were earlier colleagues at AI-driven content marketing platform Pepper Content, where Agarwal was head of product and Garg was head of engineering.

Before his Pepper Content stint, Agarwal was a director of product management at Freshworks. He had joined Freshworks after it acquired his first startup, Framebench, a real-time visual review application.

“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