Artificial intelligence platform Portkey.ai has secured a $3 million seed funding to empower engineering teams to build and launch generative AI apps faster. It’ll use the new funding to scale the business (tech and staff) and build new product capabilities.
In supporting the company’s mission to help businesses conquer time and budget constraints, the funding round was led by Lightspeed with participation from angel investors including AWS, OpenAI, Cloudflare, Postman and Asana.
After it was established in January 2023, Portkey founders Rohit Agarwal and Ayush Garg both worked together on product development and go-to-market for the Al products built on top of LLMs.
Co-founder Agarwal says, “Tech chiefs are facing a rush of demand from teams for Al 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.”
Deploying AI apps with ease
The platform has built tools that enable businesses to oversee their language model operations (LLMOps), connect to several large language models, conduct experiments, make enhancements and handle prompts.
Portkey also provides integrations with AI labs such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Langchain, Llamaindex and others. They currently serve many daily requests for innovative Gen AI companies such as Postman, Jio Haptik, Springworks and more using its full stack LLMOps solution.
“Our vision for Portkey has been to enable teams and companies to deploy Gen Al apps and features with confidence,” added Agarwal.
A company developing Gen AI features can benefit from Azure and Llama2 by using smart routing, which could lead to more than 25% in budget savings with smart caching. They can also closely track the accuracy and speed of all their requests.
Creating such a platform from scratch would take months of work, multiple iterations, and substantial expertise with LLMs. However, Portkey claims it’ll take companies roughly two minutes to set everything up using its platform.
Kartik Mandaville, CEO of Springworks said, “While developing Albus, we were handling over 10K questions daily. The challenges of managing costs, latency, and rate limiting on OpenAl were becoming overwhelming. It was then that Portkey intervened, providing invaluable support through its analytics and semantic caching solutions.”
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
