Portkey Bags $3 Mn Seed Funding To Help Enterprises Ride The Generative AI Wave

Generative AI-focussed enterprise tech startup Portkey.ai has raised $3 Mn as part of a seed funding round led by Lightspeed. The round also saw participation from multiple angel investors, including AWS, OpenAI, Cloudflare, Postman, and Asana. 

Portkey cofounder Rohit Agarwal told Inc42 that the startup will deploy the funding to further scale up research and development (R&D), build its language model operations (LLMOps) stack and ramp up go-to-market strategy. Portkey will also use the funds to shore up hiring across verticals. 

“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,” Agarwal said.

Commenting on the development, Lightspeed Partner Dev Khare 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.”

Founded in 2023 by Agarwal and Ayush Garg, Portkey enables tech teams to fast-track the process of building and deploying generative AI apps. The company claims to ship AI apps in as little as two minutes. 

With integrations across platforms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Langchain and LlamaIndex, Portkey also offers full-stack LLMOps tools for connecting to LLMs or managing prompts effectively.

The startup currently claims to serve millions of requests a day and has so far partnered with names such as Postman, Jio Haptik, and Springworks, among others. Going forward, the startup plans to experiment and release products in areas such as fine-tuning models and real-time canary testing. 

Portkey aims to tap into the growing Indian internet economy, which has been led by surging app downloads. As per estimates, as many as 31.5 Bn apps were downloaded in the country in 2022. Giving further impetus has been the increasing number of enterprises looking to build and deploy app solutions across domains. As per a report, the Indian SaaS market is projected to breach the $26 Bn mark by 2026.