SUMMARY
The genesis of Portkey started with a problem statement when Agarwal was still working with Freshworks, where he led the product and AI vertical from 2015 to 2020.
Founded in April 2023, Portkey.ai enables companies to develop, launch, maintain and iterate their GenAI apps and features with agility.
At the core of Portkey.ai lies the startup’s vision to help businesses in the management and oversight of their GenAI solutions
With the advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), there’s hardly any new-age business that would want to miss jumping on the GenAI bandwagon. The same is also evident from the findings of a new research, IBM Global AI Adoption Index 2023, commissioned by IBM in February 2024.
According to the survey report, at least 59% of enterprise-scale organisations in India actively use GenAI to fuel their business growth. Moreover, 74% of enterprises that are already working with this emerging tech have accelerated their investments in the past 24 months in areas like R&D and workforce reskilling.
However, there’s a twist in the tale. The increasing dependence of organisations on this emerging technology has made way for an unanticipated hurdle — the management of Gen AI tools deployed across functions.
Rohit Agarwal, the cofounder of Portkey.ai, was able to identify this issue early on, during his stints at Freshworks and Pepper Content. Back then, Agarwal had yet to incorporate Portkey, a platform that helps businesses organise and optimally utilise AI tech to have a visible impact on businesses.
Portkey: The Beginnings
The genesis of Portkey started with a problem statement when Agarwal was still working with Freshworks, where he led the product and AI vertical from 2015 to 2020. Issues that peeved Agarwal the most were related to LLM hallucinations and the efficient use of GenAI applications.
Later, he found himself in a similar situation when he transitioned to Pepper Content in 2021. Agarwal found himself grappling with a similar challenge while scaling up the company’s AI writing assistant, Peppertype.ai.
“At Freshworks and Pepper Content, we built small tools to ensure seamless, more efficient and highly organised AI operations. Despite our efforts, these tools would only seem to solve 30-40% of our problems. We tried to find other products that could help us fill that gap but nothing seemed to work,” he said.
This prompted Agarwal to join hands with Pepper Content’s erstwhile director of engineering Ayush Garg to build a control panel for AI apps, Portkey.ai.
Founded in April 2023, Portkey.ai enables companies to develop, launch, maintain and iterate their GenAI apps and features with agility. At the core of Portkey.ai lies the startup’s vision to help businesses in the management and oversight of their GenAI solutions.
Since its incorporation, the company has been able to onboard as many as 15 clients, including names like Turing, Haptik, Postman, Quizizz, Springworks, and Merlin, among others.
A Sneak Peek Into Portkey’s Tech Stack
The startup operates a control panel called AI gateway, which acts as an interface between the apps of its clients and hosting LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPTs or Google’s Gemini, among others.
This dashboard streamlines API requests sent by businesses to OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, LLama2, Anyscale, Google Gemini and more with a unified API.
“If you look at our client companies like Postman or Quizizz, they have built their own products using generative AI. When these products go into production, they face a lot of operational challenges. These include cost control, control over LLM hallucinations, and general oversight. All of this is what Portkey covers by providing businesses with visibility and control of their AI ops,” he said.
Further explaining the functionality of the platform, Agarwal took the example of their work with edtech startup Quizizz, whose primary business revolves around providing teachers and students with quick AI-generated quizzes, lessons, and formative assessments.
While AI significantly reduced time for Quizizz, it left the company with a host of tasks to ensure a smooth operation.
Agarwal said that Quizizz was looking at checking the costs involved per AI generated quiz, testing the quality of the AI responses, and controlling the visibility of the AI ops.
“Now, the AI content generated by Quizizz goes through Portkey’s AI gateway, which allows them to monitor the input/output per user-generated prompt. More importantly, they can calculate metrics on every prompt, which will include time taken, costs involved, and quality control,” he added.
Talking about Portkey’s journey so far, Agarwal told Inc42 that its AI gateway was in the Beta phase until December last year. During this time, Portkey worked with a host of seed stage companies and relied on getting credible feedback from them to upgrade their tech stack.
The initial feedback allowed them to develop case studies and gradually reach out to larger entities. Five months after the official launch in April last year, the startup raised $3 Mn in a seed funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners from multiple angel investors, including AWS, OpenAI, Cloudflare, Postman, and Asana.
The Way Ahead For PortKey
Agarwal said that while their business is fairly horizontal at the moment, the company foresees an increased adoption of their product going ahead.
Three months out of the beta phase, the startup is currently focussed on strengthening its language model operations (LLMOps) stack, ramping up the go-to-market strategy, and hiring.
The startup currently doesn’t charge developers for up to 10k API requests a month. Meanwhile, it charges businesses $99 a month for up to 1 Mn API requests. As of now, Agarwal said that Portkey has licenced 150 AI Gateways. Out of these, only 40 AI Gateways are bringing in revenue.
“We started monetising our product after coming out of the beta phase. About 150 entities who have deployed us in production are yet to cross our payment barrier of 10K API. We expect the number of paid customers to grow 10X by the end of the year.”
Although the company is in the experimental phase to strengthen its tech stack to cater to more industries, funding is not too up on its priority list.
Imperative to mention here is that Portkey is trying to grow in the Indian GenAI space that has just started to bloom. This presents an unmatched opportunity going forward. According to Inc42’s latest report, the Indian GenAI sector is projected to surpass $17 Bn by 2030, growing from a mere $1.1 Bn in 2023.
With such growth potential on the anvil, it would be interesting to see how Portkey.ai is able to take its GenAI management stack to the next level.
